A new tightly-coupled transient electro-thermal simulation method for power electronics

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 parameters, and the active devices are modeled with nonlinear tabular compact models to avoid time-consuming TCAD simulation. The main contributions include: 1) A tightly-coupled formulation that solves the electrical and thermal responses simultaneously for better convergence property; 2) Explicit account of capacitive effects, including interconnect parasitic capacitance and gate capacitance of power devices, to improve modeling accuracy in highfrequency applications; 3) A specialized transient solver based on the matrix exponential method (MEXP) to address the multi-scale problem caused by the considerably different time scales in electrical and thermal dynamics. Numerical experiments have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed co-simulation framework.