A Novel ON-State Resistance Estimation Technique for Online Condition Monitoring of Semiconductor Devices Under Noisy Conditions

This article presents a novel method for accurate online extraction of semiconductor ON-state resistance in the presence of measurement noise. In this method, the ON-state resistance value is extracted from the measured ON-state voltage of the semiconductors and the measured load current. The extracted ON-state resistance can be used for online condition monitoring of semiconductors. The proposed method is based on extraction of selective harmonic content. The estimated values are further enhanced through an integral action that increases the signal-to-noise ratio, making the proposed method suitable in the presence of noisy measurements. These efficacy of the proposed method is verified through simulations in the MATLAB/Simulink environment, and experimentally. The estimated ON-state resistance values from the online setup are compared to offline measurements from an industrial curve tracer, where an overall estimation error of less than 1% is observed. The proposed solution maintains its estimation accuracy under variable load conditions and for different temperatures of the device under test.