Reliability issues in power electronics

Nowadays, seventy percent of the overall electrical power is managed by semiconductor power devices. Applications like automotive, aerospace and railway transportation are facing more and more stringent reliability constraints coming from the increased lifetime expectation and safety requirements. The industrial and energy sectors are also following the same trend, so that strong efforts are made to improve the reliability of power electronic systems with costeffective and sustainable solutions. In the meanwhile, Wide Band Gap semiconductor devices (WBG) are capturing increasingly new power applications, as they are quite promising in terms of switching speed, efficiency, thermal management and high voltage capability, even if their reliability performance is still far to be demonstrated.