Enhancing Commercial CAD Tools toward the Electrothermal Simulation of Power Transistors

In this contribution, we present a novel simulation strategy for the electrothermal analysis of power multicellular transistors. The approach is based on the enhancement of a commercially available circuit simulator, namely Agilent advanced design system, and relies on an effective approach to describe the 3-D thermal process in both steady-state and transient conditions. A prototype of vertical power bipolar transistor has been considered as a case-study. The fairly good agreement between simulated and experimental results demonstrates that the proposed methodology can be successfully exploited for forecasting the electrothermal behavior of power transistors with complex layout, thus providing plain guidelines to improve their thermal ruggedness