Application of linear functional observers for the thermal estimation in power modules

High integrated power electronic modules are more and more designed with the emergence of new semiconductor technologies. Thus, increase of reliability of power modules induces the precise knowledge of the local temperature, even if it can not be measured at any location. In this paper, the application of an observer is proposed. It allows to estimate the temperature at any location using measurements provided from thermal sensors located at a few precise points. The aim is to design a reduced size observer that could be implemented on a real-time embedded target such as Digital Signal Processor. Consequently, it is necessary to obtained a minimal order observer to limit the computation complexity.