Packaging and Reliability of Power Modules - Principles, Achievements and Future Challenges

A review of fundamental design principles for power modules shows, that module design is always a compromise between conflicting requirements. Nevertheless has the progress in interconnection technologies resulted in a considerable enhancement of module lifetime, allowing to extend the maximum junction temperatures to 200deg C. However, this achievement is restricted to degradation phenomena, while reliability also has to take into account earlylife failures and random failures. Besides other challenges from new semiconductor materials, the consideration of all failure modes by better lifetime models will be an important task for the future.