Reliability assessment of some high side MOSFET drivers for buck converter

Nowadays power electronic devices have a wide usage in the industries and different electrical equipment for power conditioning. As a point of view, reliability is one of important figure of merits that should be considered to have long life time and also have more probability to do exactly the proposed mission. In this paper some methods are presented to improve the reliability of power electronic components. Also some methods of system reliability improvement are reviewed. One group of converters is DC-DC step down converter which is used in different applications such as battery charger and voltage regulator. In this paper as an example, reliability of a DC-DC step down converter with Buck topology is evaluated and some kinds of switching networks including P and N channel MOSFET and proper driver topology are compared based on reliability specifics. It should be noted that the main reference used to reliability evaluation is MIL-HDBK-217 which is a military handbook to evaluation of power electronic components failure rate.