Localization and Detection of Bond Wire Faults in Multi-chip IGBT Power Modules

Multi-chip Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (mIGBT) power modules (PMs) degrade over power cycling. Bond wire lift-off is one of the major failure modes. This paper presents a technique to diagnose bond wire lift-off by analyzing the on-state voltages across collector and emitter terminals and the voltages across collector and Kelvin emitter terminals. The proposed method can indicate the first lift-off out of 37 bond wires in a mIGBT. The main novelty of the proposed technique is that it can locate the chip that has bond wire lift-off(s). The paper describes the proposed technique in detail and shows results and discussions based on practical tests which are carried out on two mIGBT PMs with different packages.