A fast and flexible thermal simulation tool validated on smart power devices

Abstract

In this paper we present a thermal simulation tool based on analytical equations, which is able to calculate temperature distributions on a die as a function of time for any number of arbitrary power sources. The tool is much faster than dedicated numerical software and offers a large flexibility to circuit designers. The results have been found to agree well with results from commercial software. Moreover, pulsed DMOS measurements have been performed in order to validate the temperature predictions.