Thermal Characterization of Silicon Carbide MOSFET Module Suitable for High-Temperature Computationally-Efficient Thermal-Profile Prediction

This article characterizes the thermal behavior of a commercialized silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFET module with special concerns on high-temperature operating conditions as well as particular focuses on SiC MOSFET dies. A temperature-dependent Cauer-type thermal model of the SiC MOSFET is proposed and extracted based on offline finite-element simulations. This Cauer model is able to reveal the temperature-dependent thermal property of each packaging layer, and it is suitable for the high-temperature thermal-profile prediction with sufficient computational efficiency. Due to the temperature-dependent thermal properties of the SiC die and ceramic material, the junction-heatsink thermal resistance can be increased by more than 10% under high-temperature conditions (up to 200 °C), which can considerably worsen thermal estimations of the SiC die and its packaging materials. Furthermore, the experimental measurement of transient thermal impedance was conducted under operating temperature variations (with virtual junction temperature ranging from 60.5 °C to 199.6 °C), and the effectiveness of the proposed temperature-dependent Cauer model was fully validated.