Tiny-scale “stealth” current sensor to probe power semiconductor device failure

“Stealth” electric current probing technique for power electronics circuits, power device modules and chips makes it possible to measure electric current without any change or disassembling the circuit and the chip connection for the measurement. The technique consists of a tiny-scale magnetic-field coil, a high speed analog amplifier and a digitizer with numerical data processing. This technique can be applied to a single bonding wire current measurement inside IGBT modules, chip scale current redistribution measurement and current measurement for surface mount devices. The “stealth” current measurement can be utilized in the failure mechanism understanding of power devices including IGBT short circuit destruction.