Webinar: Reliability Evaluation for SiC and GaN Power Devices Through Multiple Mechanism Models by Professor Joseph Bernstein

Reliability Evaluation for SiC and GaN Power Devices Through Multiple Mechanism Models by Professor Joseph Bernstein

Join us for our NEW webinar! January 14, 2026, 8:30 – 10:30 AM Pacific time (California) Cost $200 per person, Group discounts available!  Please note, this webinar will be recorded. If the time is not convenient for you, this webinar can be purchased to view at your leisure. Contact us for more details.

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Course Description:
The standard industrial approach to accelerated testing continues to assume a single failure mechanism as canonized in the Mil Handbook 217 approach. In an ideal case, where only one thermal mechanism overwhelms other competing mechanisms, this methodology may be well founded. However today, in our push to faster and more complex system designs, we have found that this methodology falls far short of expectations for reliability qualification. Hence, a modern assessment must be more sophisticated and consider all the root cause mechanisms of failure simultaneously.

SiC and GaN both are not only wide bandgap semiconductors but because their bonds are not perfectly tetrahedral, the way Silicon grows, there are inherently many more defects and dangling bonds even deep within the surface making them both much more vulnerable to defect generation and degradation. We have found that the Threshold voltage shift and R_ds,ON degradation follows a power-time law. What we found is that the degradation cannot be simply plotted as log-log to predict the slope, instead we will show that the power-law must be determined more accurately. We also propose a model for Defect Creation and Shielding leading to a power-time-law of degradation.

This seminar will point out many flaws of the traditional paradigms of reliability evaluation and lifetime prediction. I will go through actual errors that are still propagated by JEDEC standards and old-thinking methodologies that have not been updated for over 40 years. I will take you through mathematically correct ways to frame the data and make proper predictions for time to fail and parameter degradation over time. Furthermore, I will show our resonant boost-converter circuit that allows evaluating the long-term reliability predictions at very high frequencies allowing a reliability prediction for parameter degradation.

Your Instructor:
Professor Joseph B. Bernstein, has expertise in several areas of micro-electronic and power device reliability and physics of failure research including packaging, system reliability modeling, gate oxide integrity, radiation effects, Flash NAND and NOR memory, SRAM and DRAM, MEMS and laser programmable metal interconnect.  He directs the Laboratory for Failure Analysis and Reliability of Electronic Systems, teaches VLSI design courses, and heads the VLSI program at Ariel University. His Laboratory is a center of research activity dedicated to serving the needs of manufacturers of highly reliable electronic systems using commercial off the shelf parts.

Research areas include thermal, mechanical, and electrical interactions of failure mechanisms of ultra-thin gate dielectrics, Non-Volatile memory, advanced metallization, and power devices.  He also works extensively with the semiconductor industry on projects relating to failure analysis, defect avoidance, programmable interconnect used in Field Programmable Arrays and repair in microelectronic circuits and packaging.  He has developed a method for predicting device failure rates based on new JEDEC standards for multiple failure rate-based prediction. Professor Bernstein was a Fulbright Senior Researcher/Lecturer at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Physical Electronics.  Professor Bernstein is a senior member of IEEE.

Professor Bernstein is a co-author of his latest book on Reliability Prediction for Microelectronics, in which he develops the material that will be taught in this Tutorial. The book is available from Wiley and can be purchased through Amazon or any on-line book purchasing website.

Cost: $200 per person $180 per person if five or more attend from same company
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. NOTE: if you do not receive the confirmation email, please call us at 303-655-3051
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