Electro-thermal simulation of silicon carbide power modules

Abstract

We report on our development of a Silicon Carbide Power System Computer Aided Design Tool to address the need for improved methodologies for developing next generation high efficiency power electronics using Silicon Carbide power devices. The first major achievement is to develop compact models for SiC power MOSFETs and to input these models into CoolCAD's SPICE-type simulator, CoolSPICE (the student version that is for simulating standard SPICE circuits is available online: http://coolcadelectronics.com/coolspice/), to facilitate SiC power circuits design. A second aspect of the work is to extract thermal models for SiC MOSFETs, dies, packages, printed circuit boards, and modules, and then input these thermal models into a thermal simulator for calculating temperature of electronic devices, circuits and modules.