Multi-domain simulation of transient junction temperatures and resulting stress-strain behavior of power switches for long-term mission profiles

Abstract

For lifetime estimation of power converters in traction applications, one method is to calculate numerically the stress-strain hysteresis curves of the interfaces silicon-solder-DCB and/or DCB-solder-baseplate inside the power modules. This can only be achieved if the transient junction temperatures in these layers are known for a defined mission-profile. Therefore, one has to couple circuit simulation with thermal simulation and stress-strain computation. The second challenge of this problem is to perform this transient simulation taking into account switching losses in the mus-range for mission profiles over a couple of minutes. In this paper we employ a new multi-domain simulation software to achieve results with reasonable computational effort.