SPICE electrothermal modeling of power integrated circuits

Abstract

A new analog behavioral modeling method for mixed electrical-thermal SPICE simulations was developed. It can be applied to power integrated circuits as well as to VLSI circuit simulation, where the devices exhibit a dynamic electrothermal behavior. Both the electrical and thermal laws are modeled by means of "in line equation" controlled sources, which form a global electrical equivalent circuit, that can be analyzed with a general purpose circuit simulator. The proposed electrothermal macromodel greatly increases the simulation accuracy and the analysis time is comparable with that of standard intrinsic SPICE models.