Influence of the clamping pressure on the electrical, thermal and mechanical behaviour of press-pack IGBTs

The press-pack housing was initially available only in monolithic thyristors, diodes and GTOs for high power applications with strict reliability requirements. Due the technological developments of the last years, the IGBT became a common solution for power electronics converters including the higher power range. This trend and the positive experiences on the package created a demand for press-pack IGBTs. However, since the structure of the IGBT cannot be produced on a single wafer, the press pack housing was adopted for a multi die configuration resulting in a completely new structure. The electrical, thermal and mechanical behaviour of such a package is very sensitive to the applied clamping pressure. This paper discusses this dependency for different clamping devices and their resulting pressure distributions.