Design a Continuous Switching Test Circuit for Power Devices to Evaluate Reliability

This study presents a design method for the continuous switching test circuits of power devices. Depending on the relationship between the rated voltage of a DC voltage source and device under test (DUT), two types of test circuits are proposed. These test circuits comprise a cascaded buck-boost (or boost-buck) converter to achieve power regeneration. Based on analysis of the test circuits, a design method is proposed to ensure that any failure does not spread to the test circuit even when the DUT fails during the continuous switching tests. A test circuit is designed according to the proposed method, and its experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed design.