Special issue on reliability of new technologies for power electronics (Si and wide band gap devices, interconnections, passives, analysis and applications)

According to Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat), renewable energy share in the EU was 18.9% in 2018. The current growth in the global share of energy generation and consumption that is electrically-based is predicted to accelerate over the coming decades, reaching 70% in 2050. Both these amazing results rely completely on power electronics that is needed to convert voltages and frequencies to match the specific application, such as industrial drives, automotive, aerospace, and railway transportation. Therefore, power electronics technology is demanded to be more and more reliable to cope with such an impressive trend.

Frontier Silicon-based technologies, such as 3-D integration and smart power devices, wide bandgap semiconductors (WBG), new packaging interconnections, emerging passive technologies, and new concepts, such as disruptive conversion topologies, are capturing increasing interest, even though their reliability performance is still far to be demonstrated. It is generally recognized that electronic equipment is stressed by many factors, including extreme mission profiles, temperature, humidity, vibration, cosmic rays, which lead to the degradation of the components, therefore multidisciplinary knowledge is needed, as illustrated by the triangle in the figure.

This special issue on the Reliability of new Power Electronics Technologies copes with the above challenges, collecting 35 state-of-the-art submissions from industry and academia in several hot topics in the field. Fourteen selected contributions were accepted out of them and have been subdivided into four sections titled: Power Devices, Packaging, Converters, and Reliability prediction.