The paper deals with the behaviour of PT and NPT IGBTs under repetitive short-circuit operations. The repetition of these severe working conditions is responsible for one mode of devices ageing and results unavoidably in the components failures. A long term campaign of experimental tests was made in order to determine the number of short-circuit operations these devices can support before failure for different dissipated energies during the short-circuit tests. The results show the very good ability of these devices to work in short-circuit operations when the dissipated energy is lower than a particular critical energy. Depending on the dissipated energy level, different failures modes can appear, in both PT and NPT transistors. In addition, a 1-D numerical simulation was realised in order to estimate the internal temperature in the silicon chip when the failure occurs.
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