Reliability of CoolMOS™ under extremely hard repetitive electrical working conditions

The papers deals with the behavior of CoolMOS transistors under extremely hard repetitive working conditions like transient avalanche and short-circuit operations. The repetition of these severe working operations is responsible for the devices ageing and results unavoidably in the components failures. A long term campaign of experimental tests was made in order to determine the number of hard working operations the devices can support before failure for different dissipated energies. Moreover, the CoolMOS behavior was compared with IGBTs having similar characteristics. The results show the very good ability of these devices to work in extremely hard repetitive working operations.