Dual approach for bipolar transistor thermal impedance determination

Abstract

This paper presents a dual approach for a coherent determination and validation of heterostructure bipolar transistor (HBT) thermal impedance. This study relies both on an experimental characterization method and a 3D finite element simulation approach. One section reminds briefly the experimental approach. Another describes the 3D device modeling used for the physics-based thermal simulation. Thereafter, details on the reduction method used for the numerical computation of the thermal impedance are given. As complement to pure thermal simulation, an electrothermal distributed model is proposed and gives an interpretation of the distributed effects in multi-finger devices.