Thermal and Electrical Characterization of Power Mosfet Module Using Coupled Field Analysis

Abstract

Temperature resulting from the joule heating power and the turn-on and turn-off dissipation of high-power, high-frequency applications is the root cause of their thermal instability, electrical performance degradation, and even thermal-fatigue failure. Thus, the study presents thermal and electrical characterizations of the power MOSFET module packaged in SOT-227 under natural convection and forced convection through three-dimensional (3D) thermal-electric (TE) coupled field analysis. In addition, the influences of some key parameters like electric loads, ambient conditions, thermal management considerations (heat sink, heat spreader) and operation conditions (duty cycle and switching frequency) on the power loss and thermal performance of the power module are addressed. The study starts from a suitable estimation of the power losses, where the conduction losses are calculated using the temperature-and gate-voltage-dependent on-state resistance and drain current through the device, and the switching losses are predicted based on the ideal switching waveforms of the power MOSFETs applied. The effectiveness of the theoretical predictions in terms of device's power losses and temperatures is demonstrated through comparison with the results of circuit simulation and thermal experiment.