Comparison of junction temperature evaluations in a power IGBT module using an IR camera and three thermo-sensitive electrical parameters

The measurement of the junction temperature with thermo-sensitive electrical parameters (TSEPs) is largely used by electrical engineers or researchers but the obtained temperature value is generally not verified by any referential information of the actual chip temperature distribution. In this paper, we propose to use infrared (IR) measurements in order to evaluate the relevance of three commonly used TSEP with IGBT chips: the saturation voltage under a low current, the gate-emitter voltage and the saturation current. The IR measurements are presented in details with an estimation of the emissivity of the black paint deposited on the power module. The temperatures obtained with IR measurement and with the different TSEPs are then compared in two cases: the use of only one chip and the use of two paralleled chips.