Effective Electrothermal Analysis of Electronic Devices and Systems with Parameterized Macromodeling

Abstract

We propose a parameterized macromodeling methodology to effectively and accurately carry out dynamic electrothermal (ET) simulations of electronic components and systems, while taking into account the influence of key design parameters on the system behavior. In order to improve the accuracy and to reduce the number of computationally expensive thermal simulations needed for the macromodel generation, a decomposition of the frequency-domain data samples of the thermal impedance matrix is proposed. The approach is applied to study the impact of layout variations on the dynamic ET behavior of a state-of-the-art 8-finger AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistor grown on a SiC substrate. The simulation results confirm the high accuracy and computational gain obtained using parameterized macromodels instead of a standard method based on iterative complete numerical analysis.