Chip-coil design for wireless power transfer in power semiconductor modules

This paper presents electromagnetic simulations of a wireless power transfer system suitable for a monitoring system for detection of solder fatigue in power semiconductor modules. Power is provided wirelessly from a printed spiral coil on a printed circuit board to a silicon chip with an on-chip coil. We use and adapt a known gradient-ascent-based optimization algorithm to obtain suitable coil geometries. For a frequency of 433 MHz, the simulations show an efficiency of −33.9 dB which we conclude is sufficient for the proposed monitoring system.