Review on the Thermal Parameters Applications in the Reliability of Power Semiconductor Device

The power semiconductor device plays a key role in the energy conversion and management, and the failure of device usually makes great economic losses. To improve the reliability of device, many methods have been proposed, including the condition monitoring, junction temperature estimation, lifetime prediction and thermal control. All above techniques are closely related to the thermal parameters of device. Therefore, this paper reviews these studies and analyzes their relationships from the aspect of thermal parameters. Different kinds of thermal network models are also presented. In addition, the limitations and potential of existing reliability improvement methods based on the thermal parameters are discussed and summarized.