Modular thermal design approach for semiconductor modules in power electronic converters

This paper presents a new modular approach for the thermal design of semiconductor power modules that serves to determine the number and size of the power semiconductor chips, the used packaging technology and the heat sink design at an early stage of the design process. As in various applications like for example photovoltaic inverters the thermal design is mainly dependent upon the worst case stationary operation conditions, the model refers to the static thermal behavior of the system only. It consists of three parts: first, a 2D simulation based calculation of the thermal resistance between the semiconductor chips and the heat sink, second, an analytic model for designing forced air cooled heat sinks and last, a routine for suitable combination of modules and heat sinks.