Loss and thermal analysis of semiconductor devices applied to an electric circuit simulator

The aim of this paper is to create an education tool to estimate the losses and the dynamic behavior of the junction temperature of a semiconductor device, to be employed in a simulation software of electrical circuits. It must be highlighted that the temperature is one of the most important variables to be controlled in a switch-mode power converter and presents a great impact on converter efficiency and power density. Due to the lack of a simple tool to analyze the thermal behavior of a static converter, this paper proposes an algorithm to predict the losses (conduction and switching) and the temperature behavior in a semiconductor device. Using this algorithm the heat-sink design can be optimized in order to project a converter with high power density. The methodology which easily extracts the loss and thermal models, without huge computational efforts, is demonstrated. The proposed approach can be used as an educational tool, since it can be easily implemented in a circuit simulation software, assisting students of Power Electronics. It is important to note, that experimental results are presented to validate the proposed approach.