Power Cycling Capability and Lifetime Estimation of Discrete Silicon Carbide Power Devices

In this work, the three most common lifetime models for power semiconductors i.e. LESIT, CIPS08 and SKiM63 are investigated regarding their applicability for SiC power devices. For this reason, multiple power cycling tests with a large number of devices were performed. The results show that those models can properly reflect the power cycling test results of SiC power semiconductors for higher temperature swings if the model parameter are properly adjusted. However, they show a significant error for lower temperature swings and drastically underestimate the lifetime. This indicates that the inferior power cycling performance of SiC power devices compared to silicon at high temperature swings does not necessarily imply that the service life is affected in the same order of magnitude.