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Non-obvious mosfet failure cause

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jwet:
All good points- agreed.  During my 40 or so years in the industry, I've seen device performance driven by the dominant applications. (I was an apps engineer basically...). There is generally some kind of theoretical asymptote dotted line line that shows up on all the figure of merit graphs that just keeps getting closer.

In the late 80's, 90's, computers- NB, PC's and servers and dense rack stuff needed hefty LV point of load supplies-  this drove Rons for small efficient DC-DC's.  This wasn't moore's law or anything, just some judicious engineering pushing and tailoring to the market.  Power MOSFET's in the 20-30V category improved a lot in that decade- Siliconix and Vishay.

Later, a lot of work was done on SJ and related vertical structures for med. current line voltage stuff like white goods, appliance motor drivers, etc.  Trading Silicon for copper and iron in motors, etc. improving efficiencies and lower cost.

Medium voltage, high current apps for automotive and battery power tools drove a lot of innovation for a while.  Electric vehicle needs seem to be pushing hard these days.  There are some clever IGBT/SJ like hybrid devices starting to show up.

SJ LDMOS sounds pretty cool, I'd have to talk to a real process guy.  As the application needs develop, I'm sure there are plenty of smart process guys/companies that will make it happen if there is a need.

At Maxim, the research and process guys were reading papers and thinking about different optimizations kind of waiting for design and apps to come calling.  It always seemed like when we asked, they could make a 5x improvement in any specific parameter by optimizing and sometimes trading somethings else off.

I don't follow this stuff closely these days but find it fascinating.

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