Impact of Chaos on MOSFET Thermal Stress and Lifetime

The reliability of power electronic switching components is of great concern for many researchers. For their usage in many mission profiles, it is crucial for them to perform for the duration of their intended lifetime; however, they can fail because of thermal stress. Thus, it is essential to analyze their thermal performance. Non-linear switching action, bifurcation and chaotic events may occur in DC-DC power converters. Consequently, they show different behaviors when their parameters change. However, this is an opportunity to study these bifurcation phenomena and the existence of chaos, e.g., in boost converters, on their performance as the effects of load variations (mission profiles) on the system’s behavior. These variations generate many non-linear phenomena such as periodic behavior, repeated period-doubling bifurcations and chaos in the MOSFET drain-source current. Thus, we propose, for the first time, an analysis of the influence of chaos on the junction temperature. First of all, this paper provides a step-by-step procedure to establish an electrothermal model of a C2M0080120D MOSFET with integrated power loss. Then, the junction temperature is estimated by computing the power losses and a thermal impedance model of the switch. Additionally, this model is used to investigate the bifurcation and chaotic behavior of the MOSFET junction temperature. The paper contributes by providing a mathematical model to calculate several coefficients based on experimental data and thermal oscillations. Estimation of the number of cycles to failure is given by the Coffin–Manson equation, while temperature cycles are counted using the rainflow counting algorithm. Further, the accumulated damage results are calculated using the Miner’s model. Finally, a comparison is made between the damage accumulated during different mission profiles: significant degradation of the MOSFET’s lifetime is pointed out for chaotic currents compared to periodic ones.