Power metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are the core components of power electronic systems, and it is of great significance to ensure their safe and reliable operation. As a real-time, online and non-invasive monitoring method, acoustic emission (AE) monitoring technology has a good application prospect in the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of power MOSFETs. The stress wave will be generated when the power MOSFET is turned on and off. However, in the majority of the present research, stress waves are only detected and analyzed for normal devices, and no correlation between the characteristics of stress waves and specific failures inside the device has yet been established. As a result, the gate-source overvoltage failure experiment was conducted. The MOSFET’s stress wave under different gate-source voltages was acquired. Besides, the stress wave that occurred when the chip failed was also recorded. Time domain analysis and wavelet analysis were performed on the stress wave signal, and the conclusion can be drawn that the peak-to-peak value in the time domain, the signal energy and the wavelet peak value of the stress wave at the time of failure are significantly different from those in the normal condition. This work aims to lay the foundation for establishing the correlation between the characteristics of stress waves and device failures.

acoustic emission;metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor;stress wave;gate-source voltage;condition monitoring