Detection of Bond Wire Failure in Power Semiconductors by Adjacent Temperature Sensors

In this work, a method for the detection of detached bond wires from the chip of a discrete power semiconductor is presented. For this, differences in the thermal behavior caused by manipulated bond wires are detected with four external temperature sensors adjacent to the device. For experimental verification of this method, multiple test devices with varying bond wire faults are subjected to a power pulse and the temperature response is recorded. Two different concepts for the interpretation of the measured data are presented. The suitability of both concepts is discussed and the sensor requirements for a successful fault detection are evaluated.