Approaching repetitive short circuit tests on MW-scale power modules by means of an automatic testing setup

An automatic testing system to perform repetitive short-circuit tests on megawatt-scale IGBT power modules is pre-sented and described in this paper, pointing out the advantages and features of such testing approach. The developed system is based on a non-destructive short-circuit tester, which has been integrated with an advanced software tool and a semiconductor device analyzer to perform stress monitoring on the considered device under test (DUT). A case-study is included in the paper concerning a 1.7 kV/ 1 kA IGBT module, which has been tested safely up to 30,000 repetitions with no significant damage. The developed system has been demonstrated to be very helpful in performing a large number of repetition tests as required by modern testing protocols for robustness and reliability assess-ment. The software algorithm and a demonstration video are available for download.