A Multi-Manufacturer Test Campaign to Assess the Power Cycling Capability of Silicon Carbide MOSFETs in TO-247 Packages

In this work, the power cycling capability of discrete SiC MOSFETs of seven manufacturers is investigated. The results show that even nominally similar devices can exhibit substantially different power cycling capabilities. The differences among the tested devices involve the scaling factor and the slope of the lifetime curves, but also the dependence of the baseline temperature. Furthermore, some devices exhibit a considerable increase in power cycling performance towards lower temperature swings, which cannot be characterized properly by power cycling tests at typical test conditions with much larger temperature swings. Thus for a proper assessment of the power cycling performance, multiple tests at suitable test conditions are necessary to obtain meaningful results.