The Study on Thermal Coupling Effect for SiC Power Module Design Guidelines

Abstract

SiC devices have excellent characteristics compared with silicon devices. But its superiority is not fully utilized in some occasions, where the operating ambient temperature is high, the cooling system is constricted, the high power density and decreased size is needed. In this paper, the thermal coupling effect which is vital to further improving the SiC power module in mentioned occasions is investigated by physical analytical derivation and finite element method (FEM) analysis at first. Several designing guidelines for SiC power module are presented at the view of attenuating thermal coupling effect. According to designing guidelines, a SiC-based, half bridge power module using the novel packaging structure called interleaved double-sided packaging structure is proposed. Due to the low thermal coupling effect and more balanced temperature distribution, this module features excellent thermal performance.