Advanced Packaging for Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Power Modules

WBG semiconductors (i.e. SiC and GaN) outperform silicon in terms of breakdown field (10X in the case of SiC) and thermal conductivity (2X in the case of SiC), hence, ensuring smaller conduction losses and better heat dissipation combined with faster switching frequency. All this results in saving energy (i.e. smaller battery) and costs (i.e. smaller passive components and volume of the power module). However, to take fully advantage of WBG semiconductors it is of paramount importance to: (i) develop new packaging technologies, (ii) optimize the packaging design in terms of thermo-electric and electromagnetic (i.e. stray inductance and mutual coupling) behavior to ensure clean and fast switching of the MOSFETs and avoid oscillations. This talk will start from basic concepts of power module design by taking a half-bridge topology as reference and will show some of the tools and methodologies that are currently used for the optimization. Moreover, the talk will briefly describe some of the new advanced technologies (embedding, chip scale packaging, sintering) for the packaging of GaN and SiC power modules.

Speaker(s): Dr. Giovanni Salvatore,

Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/361989