An accurate calorimetric method for measurement of switching losses in silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs

A Comparison of the Hard-Switching Performance of 650 V Power Transistors With Calorimetric Verification

“…Calorimetry provides a measurement of switching losses that is not dependent on high-bandwidth electrical measurements and so can be used to validate the approach of Section IV. Validation of the switching losses using calorimetric measurements is performed in [18]- [24]. Large errors between the calorimetry and electrical measurements are seen in [19] and estimated to be as large as ±20% in the best performing methods presented in [20].…”

Switching losses prediction methods oriented to power MOSFETs – a review

“…In the case of power MOSFET loss analysis, experimental validation can be performed with either calorimetric or electrical power losses measurement techniques. The calorimetric technique is used to measure the total losses of a given device during the continuous operation within an enclosed thermal chamber [31, 32]. Although this approach is useful for estimating the efficiency of the whole converter, there are some drawbacks when applying it to predict the losses of a single device.…”

“…In contrast to the calorimetric method, the purely electrical approach to loss measurement using a DPT circuit allows to separately compute the switching losses using current and voltage waveforms, which are obtained from an oscilloscope, without the need of an external post‐processing system [31–33].…”

Discrete Power Semiconductor Losses Versus Junction Temperature Estimation Based on Thermal Impedance Curves

“…In order to get rid of electrical measurements during switching and to avoid the bandwidth requirements and/or the temporal synchronization between current and voltage measurements, several studies have focused on electrical measurements of total losses at the converter level [3] - [5], or on calorimetric measurements [6] - [14].…”

“…This method has been used for devices with high switching speed when insertion of current probes was prohibited, for example for GaN HEMTs [11], for SiC BJT [12] or for SiC MOSFET and diodes used in soft switching [13]. Moreover, the Discrete power semi-conductor losses vs junction temperature estimation based on thermal impedance curves Do Phuong Uyen TRAN 1 , Stéphane LEFEBVRE 2 , Yvan AVENAS 1 conduction, turn-on and turn-off losses can be also estimated separately by adding a switch in series with the top leg of a halfbridge circuit and modifying the modulation strategy [13], [14]. Such techniques have been implemented and allow estimating the losses with satisfactory results.…”