Circuit-Level Electrothermal Simulation

Abstract

The scope of previous work on electrothermal simulation using network analysis techniques has been limited due to the lack of avalanche breakdown models which can efficiently describe the temperature dynamics [59, 58, 89]. For EOS/ESD, an accurate description of temperature-dependent device electrical behaviour including breakdown phenomena is of central importance. This chapter presents the fundamental aspects of circuit-level electrothermal simulation and their implementation in the newly developed circuit simulator IETSIM. In Section 7.1, the temperature-dependent device parameters of the device models used in SPICE [6] are reviewed. This section also discusses a generalization of Miller’s formula [72] to account for temperature-dependent avalanche breakdown phenomena. Section 7.2 presents an algorithm that enables circuit simulators to safely handle avalanche breakdown characteristics. Section 7.3 introduces a thermal model that enables efficient coupling of the thermal and electrical device phenomena for circuit simulation. With all of these elements in place, Section 7.4 introduces the electrothermal circuit simulator iETSIM.