Active Power Cycling Test

In order to investigate the reliability of power electronic modules related to thermal fatigue, an active power cycling test is regarded as the most important accelerated aging test. Heraeus has the experience in reliability tests as well as active power cycling. This helps you to speed up your development and brings your new products faster to market.

Active Power Cycling

During their lifetime, power electronic modules are exposed to a great thermo-mechanical stress. With the further development of power semiconductor devices, system integration and optimization, the thermal stress is even increasing even more: the use of smaller and thinner dies leads to increased power density and ends up at higher operating temperatures. Besides the thermal stress generated through the high temperatures in the die, also external thermal cycles and different temperature levels of the cooling system have an influence.

The active temperature cycling is an accelerated lifetime test for power electronic devices. This module endurance test is used for lifetime modelling. It is an end of life test.

In contrast to the temperature cycling test, the devices under testing are actively heated by the power loss of the chip-inside and afterwards cooled down by the heat sink coolant. Therefore this is an endurance test in contrast, the passive temperature cycling test is an environmental test.

However, various selections of test parameters and control strategies make the active power cycling test the most complicated reliability test to perform .

Our experts in our application centers offer testing services to help customers to investigate the reliability performance of their products. This helps you to speed up your development and optimize your processes.


ECPE Guideline AQG 324

Heraeus not only offers its expertise in the form of products and services to its customers, but also contributes its knowledge to the European Center for Power Electronics (ECPE) Working Group ´Automotive Power Module Qualification´.

The  ECPE Guideline AQG 324 ´Qualification of Power Modules for Use in Power Electronics Converter Units (PCUs) in Motor Vehicles´ has been released by the responsible ECPE Working Group ´Automotive Power Module Qualification´ comprising more than 30 ECPE member companies from the automotive market.