Sintered silver finite element modelling and reliability based design optimisation in power electronic module

• This paper discusses the design for reliability of a sintered silver joint in a power electronic module based on finite element approach.
• Thermo-mechanical behaviour of the power module sintered silver joint model is simulated.
• The methodology utilises approximate response surface modelling based on interpolation techniques using Kriging and radial basis functions.
• The reduced order models are used to evaluate the effect of design uncertainties using Latin Hypercube sampling.
• A reliability based design optimisation is demonstrated using Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm.

This paper discusses the design for reliability of a sintered silver structure in a power electronic module based on the computational approach that composed of high fidelity analysis, reduced order modelling, numerical risk analysis, and optimisation. The methodology was demonstrated on sintered silver interconnect sandwiched between silicon carbide chip and copper substrate in a power electronic module. In particular, sintered silver reliability due to thermal fatigue material degradation is one of the main concerns. Thermo-mechanical behaviour of the power module sintered silver joint structure is simulated by finite element analysis for cyclic temperature loading profile in order to capture the strain distribution. The discussion was on methods for approximate reduced order modelling based on interpolation techniques using Kriging and radial basis functions. The reduced order modelling approach uses prediction data for the thermo-mechanical behaviour. The fatigue lifetime of the sintered silver interconnect and the warpage of the interconnect layer was particular interest in this study. The reduced order models were used for the analysis of the effect of design uncertainties on the reliability of the sintered silver layer. To assess the effect of uncertain design data, a method for estimating the variation of reliability related metrics namely Latin Hypercube sampling was utilised. The product capability indices are evaluated from the distributions fitted to the histogram resulting from Latin Hypercube sampling technique. A reliability based design optimisation was demonstrated using Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm for constraint optimisation task consists of optimising two different characteristic performance metrics such as the thermo-mechanical plastic strain accumulation per cycle on the sintered layer and the thermally induced warpage.