Who in the "drive" industry 4.0 Industry News Silver Wing

Technological progress and rising labor costs have contributed to the upgrading of industrial manufacturing, and the development of the global manufacturing sector has developed corresponding development plans such as "Made in China 2025", "Industrial 4.0" and "Industrial Internet".

In the industrial production of digital, intelligent process, we should not forget the real "drive" industrial equipment operation of semiconductor components, especially power devices. Today, power devices are widely used in a variety of industrial equipment to control, convert and regulate the system voltage and current, from MOSFET, IGBT, to emerging silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) devices, different types Of the power devices to meet the needs of different industrial applications.

Requirements for power devices for industrial applications

Power devices for industrial equipment, the use of more stringent conditions, and some applications need 24 hours 365 days without interruption. Renesas Electronics Greater China Automotive Electronics Business Center, senior expert Ochiaan Kang pointed out that the design and development of power devices, we must consider two points. "One is the loss characteristics, due to uninterrupted operation requirements, how to reduce the loss caused by the device has a direct impact on the factory electricity costs. And different applications require different switching frequency, the engineers need to follow the actual switching frequency requirements, determine the limited consideration is conduction Loss or switching losses, and then determine the best choice; the second is the reliability, especially the unmanned plant, device failure will directly affect the loss of factory operations, so the device tolerance is also a priority.

"Industrial equipment and automated production lines have absolute reliance on power devices that are energy-converted through power devices, and functional implementation is achieved by controlling power devices." Littelfuse technology application manager Du Yao-sheng believes that The requirements for power devices are increasing, high efficiency, low power consumption, small size, and easy control and easy application, are the requirements of power applications for industrial applications.

"The power devices used in the industry must be reliable, efficient and compact, tolerate load dumping, and keep the output stable over a wide input voltage range," said Jon Gladish, ON Semiconductor's Application Engineering Manager. "In addition, Loss is small, can work in a wide temperature range.

High power devices

High-power devices are mainly used in industrial applications, compared to low-power devices, high voltage, high current high-power devices in the design and development and application need to consider more factors.

"High-current high-voltage products have to consider stress design problems, and high-power devices are usually not an ideal switching device, so the design needs to pay full attention to conduction losses, voltage change rate (du / dt), current change rate di / dt) and other issues, the diode reverse recovery time also need to consider. "force Te Yao said that the power device voltage setting is also very important, now cool MOS voltage to 1200V has been close to the limit, 1700V and 3300V can only use IGBT, But the force of the silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET is very easy to achieve 1200V and 1700V minimum voltage design.

Of course, silicon carbide MOSFET gate drive is a design difficulty, because the silicon carbide device itself loss is small, the switching frequency can be designed to 500KHz level, so the drive signal will be very fast, in addition to power insulation, but also do signal isolation isolation processing. High-frequency signals also cause electromagnetic interference problems, "anti-interference and interference will become a headache, engineers must face the EMI problem, otherwise it will trigger a trigger device out of control. High-frequency circuit board optimization and multi-point grounding system design But also become difficult, the system design is necessary to carry out time domain analysis, but also for frequency domain analysis.

ON Semiconductor Semiconductors Jon Gladish emphasizes that security is always a major consideration for power device applications, especially high-voltage, high-current high-power devices. "UL believes that higher than 60V of voltage exposure to the human body, will cause harm, and even lead to death, so high-power devices in the application, we must fully consider the safety design to meet the creepage distance and electrical clearance requirements are high-voltage device application security Of the primary conditions. "High voltage pins around the dust and foreign bodies are also harmful, functional defects should pay attention to investigation.

As the high-power devices in the work will produce a lot of heat, so also need to pay special attention to its thermal design, as far as possible by the thermal expansion mismatch caused by mechanical stress, so as to avoid danger. On how to heat the design, Jon Gladish mentioned: compliance with the specifications of the PCB layout and routing (PCB line width, thickness and diameter and other factors should be considered), excellent cooling architecture, select the smaller thermal resistance of the packaging materials.

Renesas Electronics drop-off Kang Yan said that high-voltage high-current applications, often not a single chip to bear the high current, for two or more chips in parallel use the scene, the most important thing is to control the deviation between multiple chips. "Chip characteristics deviate from the current deviation, the current concentration of the chip will be overheating or even damage to the situation, so the control device manufacturing process bias is critical.

Common failure mode

Power device failure often brings more serious consequences. In industrial applications such as uninterruptible power supplies, solar inverters, telecommunications and charging piles, failure of the power devices during operation may result in multiple secondary failures such as melting, fire or explosion. "Normally, industrial systems have overvoltage protection (OVP) overcurrent protection (OCP) fault detection," says Jon Gladish, who relies on fault detection to power off the power device, To avoid secondary failure.

Jon Gladish summed up five common power device failure modes: avalanche breakdown; electrostatic discharge (ESD) or gate surge; body diode reverse recovery current is too large. May trigger parasitic BJT; long-term work in the linear area, due to excessive current caused by thermal runaway; improper assembly caused by packaging damage.

According to Renesas Electronics, more than 90% of customer failure problems are due to overvoltages or over-current damage, especially switching devices such as IGBTs and MOSFETs, which are extremely ineffective during switching. "To prevent such failure, use appropriate drive conditions and try to suppress PCB parasitic inductance."

"The most common failure of the device is voltage breakdown, short circuit burn, so the ability of the device to resist the surge must be strong, the impact capacity must be strong. In addition to the ability to withstand the voltage is also high. Short circuit failure makes us the most troublesome problem Device short circuit on the power of the largest victory, may burn the entire circuit board, and even cause a fire. "Du Yao Sheng gave an example, the factory running the inverter is usually six legs in order to work, if the device failure caused by the upper and lower bridge Short circuit, no protection of the tube will blow up. "The power device short circuit protection is a very important design link, the drive board will set the short circuit protection time, the power device will have the maximum short circuit current nominal.

Power device development trend

In addition, the power device development is slow, but also continue to evolve from the earliest thyristor technology to GTO technology, MOSFET technology, to IGBT, IGCT or IGET, these Silicon-based technology, in the working voltage and loss parameters seem to have reached the limit. "The rise and maturity of SiC technology has brought the dawn of change to power devices." Du Yao-sheng said that improving power density is the main requirement of current power device technology. The power transmission system and power conversion system have high demand for energy efficiency, The compact SiC product, which reduces the 80% loss compared to conventional power devices, is almost an ideal switching device. "

In addition to traditional IGBTs, ON Semiconductor continues to develop wide bandgap technology, including silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), in addition to super-junction and shielded silicon-based MOSFET (shielded-gate silicon based MOSFET) But also focus on the direction. "Industry trends are designed to develop faster, more on-resistance devices that continue to reduce silicon characteristic on-resistance (RSP) and switching losses to achieve higher energy efficiency and power density." Jon Gladish points out that there is a The direction of optimization is the new package, ON Semiconductor's focus is on low parasitic resistance and inductive surface mount packaging, as well as enhance the cooling capacity of the package, such as double-sided cooling package.

Jon Gladish summed up the development trend of power technology in four directions. The first is the high-pressure, high-pressure trend is to improve energy efficiency; followed by modular, through more effective thermal management, to achieve high rated power; third is advanced technology research and development, focusing on silicon technology and wide bandgap (SiC And GaN, etc.); finally, intelligent, intelligent power devices with protection will be more suitable for industrial control.

Intelligent

According to Jon Gladish, while intelligent power modules (IPMs) are more advanced than conventional discrete devices, Harvatek is optimized for specific applications, but users do not necessarily buy it because smart power modules are usually more expensive and not Devices such as standardized products.

But the advantages of intelligent power modules more. First, the module performance is better, higher isolation, more heat dissipation, while the module can also contain complete protection functions, such as over-voltage, undercurrent and thermal shutdown; followed by the use of modules can reduce the system size, Power modules are usually packaged in a system, the MOSFET, IGBT, diode and drive circuit (Gate Driver Unit, referred to as GDU) and other die are sealed in a package, thus saving system space; Finally, the module more reliable, intelligent The power module is smaller than the discrete solution components, the processing links are reduced, the protection measures are better and the heat dissipation is better, which means higher reliability and longer life.

Renesas Electronics off Kang Yan said that the use of IPM in air conditioning and other devices have a wide range of power, but the industrial high-power devices are usually used in parallel with multiple chips, so the intelligence is the intelligence of the entire set of equipment. "For example, the use of IGBTs in pure electric vehicles, Renesas Electronics's idea is not to make the IGBT itself become intelligent, but to provide customers with the entire IGBT inverter solution.

"Integrated drive management, thermal management and protection management of intelligent products will make engineering design more concise, the special products will be more flexible and easy to use, the entire industrial applications will bring change, industrial 4.0 is intelligent Manufacturing process, this process can not be separated from the intelligent power devices or modules. "Equipment information is to achieve the basis of industrial 4.0, as Du Yao Sheng said, intelligent power device industry is the development trend.

Power devices are the core devices that ensure the normal operation of industrial equipment. The harsh industrial application scenarios place higher requirements on the parameters of industrial power devices and require a variety of protection measures to prevent the failure of power devices, High-pressure, modular, intelligent will be the future trend of the development of power devices, wide bandgap semiconductor technology is also more and more attention. It is foreseeable that in the realization of industrial 4.0 process, intelligent power module acceptance will be higher and higher.

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