Conceptual Design and Demonstration of an Automatic System for Extracting Switching Loss and Creating Data Library of Power Semiconductors

A switching characterization (SC) test of power semiconductor devices (PSDs) gives us significant insight into the dynamic switching behavior of the device under various operating conditions. A double pulse test (DPT) is a widely used method for evaluating switching performance parameters of a PSD such as its switching losses, switching speed (di/dt, dv/dt), turn-on and turn-off times etc. The scientific information obtained from analysis of DPT results of a PSD helps in predicting its thermo-electric performance in a target power electronic converter. With conventional DPT setups, it is a time-consuming and error-prone process to manually conduct these tests under several permutations of test parameters and thereafter analyze the experimental data manually. This work presents a newly developed automated SC test system, which can run tests one after another, once the desired test parameters are entered in a graphic user interface. The test-control system also enables recording and systematic processing of the experimental switching data to deliver usable characterization results. The automatic, compact and modular design allows the proposed SC test platform to stand out from the conventional DPT setups. The design principles are experimentally verified by implementing a hardware prototype capable of testing PSDs up to 1000 V, 60 A, 250 °C.