KAI Kompetenzzentrum Automobil- und Industrieelektronik GmbH was founded in 2006. Today it is a well-established competence center with 38 employees (08/2015). The main focus is on power electronics reliability, materials research, modeling and simulation.

KAI Kompetenzzentrum Automobil- und Industrieelektronik GmbH is a legally independent subsidiary, 100% owned by Infineon Technologies Austria AG. It is a well-established industrial research centre with a large national and international network of partners. Additional to core competences in the area of power electronics reliability, test concept and methodology development, advanced semiconductor materials research, Bayesian statistical lifetime modelling and multiphysics FEM simulation, KAI maintains a well-equipped electronics design laboratory, dedicated measurement equipment for materials characterization as well as state of the art simulation computing resources, complemented by a long proven experience in the coordination of interdisciplinary research projects.

Based on close contact to both a semiconductor production- and development company and renowned university institutes, leading-edge reliability stress test procedures are developed and performed at KAI. In the past years, new insights on the degradation of silicon-based power devices were gained, and advanced concepts for robust technologies and product designs have been provided. By participating in PowerBase, KAI will extend this expertise to novel GaN devices, taking profit from new cooperations with European research institutes of renowned competence and experience in the fields of GaN reliability and diagnosis.

Role & Key Contribution:

Today, KAI is established in developing application-relevant stress tests for silicon based power semiconductors, analyzing the device and interface degradation caused by such stress, and mapping the observed degradation to particular failure mechanisms and models, recurring to approaches of materials science and finite element simulation.

In the near future, GaN power devices in dedicated and often novel assemblies must be subjected to stress tests for technology and product qualification. For this emerging technology, not all failure mechanisms are fully documented yet. In particular, acceleration factors linking loading parameters (current, voltage, switching frequency, temperature swings etc.) to device degradation would be of greatest benefit for quantitative lifetime estimations. There, the complex interaction of thermo-mechanical stress and GaN-specific material properties, such as piezo-electric effects and strain caused by lattice mismatch, must be taken into account. The contribution of KAI will be focused more on second-level reliability than on wafer-related device reliability topics (e.g., charge trapping or electric breakdown mechanisms). In this strongly assembly related field the extensive KAI experience gained on thermo-mechanical stress phenomena in silicon devices will be extremely valuable as GaN power devices are emerging on the market.

Contact

	KAI Kompetenzzentrum Automobil- und Industrieelektronik GmbH
Europastraße 8
A-9524 Villach, Austria
www.k-ai.at