Abstract
This paper discusses the benefits of an advanced highly-efficient approach to static and dynamic electrothermal simulations of multicellular silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs. The strategy is based on a fully circuital representation of the device, which is discretized into an assigned number of individual cells, high enough to analyze temperature and current nonuniformities over the active area. The cells are described with subcircuits implementing a simple transistor model that accounts for the utmost influence of the traps at the SiC/SiO2 interface. The power-temperature feedback is emulated with an equivalent network corresponding to a compact thermal model automatically generated by the FANTASTIC tool from an accurate 3D mesh of the component under test. The resulting macrocircuit can be solved by any SPICE-like simulation program with low computational burden and rare occurrence of convergence issues.
Highlights
Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices are promising candidates for energy distribution, as well as for automotive, aircraft, and spacecraft applications, by virtue of their inherent features like high breakdown voltage, low on-state resistance, and excellent high-temperature capability [1].such devices often operate under critical conditions with a large amount of heat generation, which may lead to reliability degradation or even to an irreversible device failure in harsh cases
An advanced circuit-based approach for the static and dynamic electrothermal simulation of multicellular SiC power MOSFETs has been proposed, which—differently from the strategies encountered in the literature—seems to represent a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency
The device is discretized into a chosen number of elementary cells and turned into a purely-electrical macrocircuit, where (i) the cells are described with subcircuits accounting for the key and harmful influence of SiC/SiO2 interface traps, and (ii) the power-temperature feedback is modeled with an equivalent thermal network
Summary
Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices are promising candidates for energy distribution, as well as for automotive, aircraft, and spacecraft applications, by virtue of their inherent features like high breakdown voltage, low on-state resistance, and excellent high-temperature capability [1]. Such devices often operate under critical conditions with a large amount of heat generation, which may lead to reliability degradation or even to an irreversible device failure in harsh cases. Numerical 3D ET analyses with device simulators concurrently solving the semiconductor and heat transfer equations are computationally unfeasible
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