Real-time degradation monitoring of SiC-MOSFETs through readily available system microcontroller

The goal of this work is to develop a real time degradation monitoring tool for Silicon Carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs. The conventional methods for prognosis and reliability monitoring are mostly based on parametric measurements as on state resistance, threshold voltage, leakage currents etc. The change in switching characteristics of aged devices and the root cause analysis behind this change are also worth exploring for degradation monitoring. In this paper, a real-time monitoring procedure is proposed using readily available system microcontroller. For this purpose, an accelerated aging test bench is utilized to actively swing the junction temperature through power cycles in order to trigger device degradation. A number of parametric measurement results are presented for degradation discussion and turn on time variation are captured by proposed degradation monitoring approach.