Contribution to Health Monitoring of Silicon Carbide MOSFET

Power converters’ usage is expanding ever in industrial applications as they provide flexibility, high level of performances and new functionalities. However, with increased complexity come new constraints with respect to reliability. This chapter covers a study on reliability of a lab-scale power electronic module taken here as a vehicle. The downsizing of converters and new application-related operating constraints are accompanied by an increase in current density. The use of Silicon Carbide wide-gap technology in power modules is therefore attracting but remains a challenge because this technology is not yet mature and does not benefit from the deep knowledge established about Silicon counterpart. Therefore, health monitoring has naturally emerged as an effective way to implement a reliability assessment. After a brief description of the expected failure modes, an experimental failure monitoring bench will be presented. The choice and implementation of failure indicators through a classification using a neural network will be discussed and presented.