Long-term operation and reliability study of a 1200-V, 880-A all-SiC dual module

摘要

SiC MOSFETs are now commercial available and have demonstrated improved efficiency and higher operating temperatures over state of the art silicon components. Ongoing research activities have produced a massively-paralleled all-SiC module to examine the feasibility and reliability of high-current all-SiC modules. This paper documents a reliability study for a 1200-V, 880-A all-SiC dual MOSFET module operated in an experimental circuit. Over 500 hours of circuit runtime has been accumulated and MOSFET characteristics were routinely evaluated. The switches demonstrated a high degree of stability in leakage current, forward resistance, junction temperature rise, and switching energies as all of these characteristics changed less than 14%. With this demonstration of reliability, the substantial benefits of a massively paralleled all-SiC module can be utilized by design engineers for future power electronic systems.