An Efficient Transient Electro-Thermal Simulation Framework for Power Integrated Circuits

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 stack and substrate are meshed and solved with 3D field solver using nonlinear temperature-dependent electrical and thermal parameters, and the active transistors are modeled with table models to avoid time-consuming TCAD simulation. Two contributions are made to enhance the physical relevance and the computational performance: 1) The capacitive effects, including interconnect parasitic capacitance and gate capacitance of power devices with nonlinear dependence on bias and temperature, are explicitly accounted for; 2) A specialized nonlinear exponential integrator (EI) method is developed to address the considerably different time scales between electrical and thermal sectors. The EI-based transient solver allows the electrical system to step with much larger time steps than in conventional methods, thus the time step gap between the electrical and the thermal simulation is largely reduced.