A chip-level transient electro-thermal field simulator with gate capacitance and matrix exponential

Abstract

This paper presents a new transient electro-thermal (ET) simulation method for fast 3D chip-level analysis of power electronics with field solver accuracy. The metallization stacks are meshed and solved with 3D field solver using nonlinear temperature-dependent electrical and thermal parameters, and the active transistors are modeled with compact models to avoid time-consuming TCAD simulation. Two new ingredients are introduced to further enhance physical relevance and computational performance: 1) Gate capacitance of power MOS is explicitly accounted for in the electrical subsystem to improve the modeling accuracy for power devices with large summed gate capacitance; 2) To address the considerably different time scales between electrical and thermal sectors, the electrical system is solved by the matrix exponential method (MEXP), which allows larger time step sizes without sacrificing accuracy and thus accelerates the ET coupled simulation. © 2014 IEEE.