Circuit-Based Electrothermal Simulation of Multicellular SiC Power MOSFETs Using FANTASTIC

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.

Keywords

• electrothermal (ET) simulation
• finite-element method (FEM)
• model-order reduction (MOR)
• multicellular power MOSFET
• silicon carbide (SiC)