A High-Temperature, High-Voltage SOI Gate Driver Integrated Circuit with High Drive Current for Silicon Carbide Power Switches

High-temperature integrated circuit (IC) design is one of the new frontiers in microelectronics that can significantly improve the performance of the electrical systems in extreme environment applications, including automotive, aerospace, well-logging, geothermal, and nuclear. Power modules (DC-DC converters, inverters, etc.) are key components in these electrical systems. Power-to-volume and power-to-weight ratios of these modules can be significantly improved by employing silicon carbide (SiC) based power switches which are capable of operating at much higher temperature than silicon (Si) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) based conventional devices. For successful realization of such high-temperature power electronic circuits, associated control electronics also need to perform at high temperature. In any power converter, gate driver circuit performs as the interface between a low-power microcontroller and the semiconductor power switches. This dissertation presents design, implementation, and measurement results of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) based high-temperature (\u3e200 _C) and high-voltage (\u3e30 V) universal gate driver integrated circuit with high drive current (\u3e3 A) for SiC power switches. This mixed signal IC has primarily been designed for automotive applications where the under-hood temperature can reach 200 _C. Prototype driver circuits have been designed and implemented in a Bipolar-CMOS- DMOS (BCD) on SOI process and have been successfully tested up to 200 _C ambient temperature driving SiC switches (MOSFET and JFET) without any heat sink and thermal management. This circuit can generate 30V peak-to-peak gate drive signal and can source and sink 3A peak drive current. Temperature compensating and temperature independent design techniques are employed to design the critical functional units like dead-time controller and level shifters in the driver circuit. Chip-level layout techniques are employed to enhance the reliability of the circuit at high temperature. High-temperature test boards have been developed to test the prototype ICs. An ultra low power on-chip temperature sensor circuit has also been designed and integrated into the gate-driver die to safeguard the driver circuit against excessive die temperature (_ 220 _C). This new temperature monitoring approach utilizes a reverse biased p-n junction diode as the temperature sensing element. Power consumption of this sensor circuit is less than 10 uW at 200 _C

Transient Non-linear Thermal FEM Simulation of Smart Power Switches and Verification by Measurements

Thermal FEM (Finite Element Method) simulations can be used to predict the thermal behavior of power semiconductors in application. Most power semiconductors are made of silicon. Silicon thermal material properties are significantly temperature dependent. In this paper, validity of a common non-linear silicon material model is verified by transient non-linear thermal FEM simulations of Smart Power Switches and measurements. For verification, over-temperature protection behavior of Smart Power Switches is employed. This protection turns off the switch at a pre-defined temperature which is used as a temperature reference in the investigation. Power dissipation generated during a thermal overload event of two Smart Power devices is measured and used as an input stimulus to transient thermal FEM simulations. The duration time of the event together with the temperature reference is confronted with simulation results and thus the validity of the silicon model is proved. In addition, the impact of non-linear thermal properties of silicon on the thermal impedance of power semiconductors is shown.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

Is Europe in the Driver's Seat? The Competitiveness of the European Automotive Embedded Systems Industry

This report is one of a series resulting from a project entitled ¿Competitiveness by Leveraging Emerging Technologies Economically¿ (COMPLETE), carried out by JRC-IPTS. Each of the COMPLETE studies illustrates in its own right that European companies are active on many fronts of emerging and disruptive ICT technologies and are supplying the market with relevant products and services. Nevertheless, the studies also show that the creation and growth of high tech companies is still very complex and difficult in Europe, and too many economic opportunities seem to escape European initiatives and ownership. COMPLETE helps to illustrate some of the difficulties experienced in different segments of the ICT industry and by growing potential global players. This report reflects the findings of a study conducted by Egil Juliussen and Richard Robinson, two senior experts from iSuppli Corporation on the Competitiveness of the European Automotive Embedded Software industry. The report starts by introducing the market, its trends, the technologies, their characteristics and their potential economic impact, before moving to an analysis of the competitiveness of the corresponding European industry. It concludes by suggesting policy options. The research, initially based on internal expertise and literature reviews, was complemented with further desk research, expert interviews, expert workshops and company visits. The results were ultimately reviewed by experts and also in a dedicated workshop. The report concludes that currently ICT innovation in the automotive industry is a key competence in Europe, with very little ICT innovation from outside the EU finding its way into EU automotive companies. A major benefit of a strong automotive ICT industry is the resulting large and valuable employment base. But future maintenance of automotive ICT jobs within the EU will only be possible if the EU continues to have high levels of product innovation.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Practical classification of different moving targets using automotive radar and deep neural networks

In this work, the authors present results for classification of different classes of targets (car, single and multiple people, bicycle) using automotive radar data and different neural networks. A fast implementation of radar algorithms for detection, tracking, and micro-Doppler extraction is proposed in conjunction with the automotive radar transceiver TEF810X and microcontroller unit SR32R274 manufactured by NXP Semiconductors. Three different types of neural networks are considered, namely a classic convolutional network, a residual network, and a combination of convolutional and recurrent network, for different classification problems across the four classes of targets recorded. Considerable accuracy (close to 100% in some cases) and low latency of the radar pre-processing prior to classification (∼0.55 s to produce a 0.5 s long spectrogram) are demonstrated in this study, and possible shortcomings and outstanding issues are discussed

Novel Thermal Management Strategy for Improved Inverter Reliability in Electric Vehicles

Requirements for electric vehicle (EV) propulsion systems—i.e., power density, switching frequency and cost—are becoming more stringent, while high reliability also needs to be ensured to maximize a vehicle’s life-cycle. Thus, the incorporation of a thermal management strategy is convenient, as most power inverter failure mechanisms are related to excessive semiconductor junction temperatures. This paper proposes a novel thermal management strategy which smartly varies the switching frequency to keep the semiconductors’ junction temperatures low enough and consequently extend the EV life-cycle. Thanks to the proposal, the drivetrain can operate safely at maximum attainable performance limits. The proposal is validated through simulation in an advanced digital platform, considering a 75-kW in-wheel Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (IPMSM) drive fed by an automotive Silicon Carbide (SiC) power converter.This work has been supported in part by the European Commission through ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under Grant Agreement No. 783174 (HiPERFORM project), by the Government of the Basque Country within the research program ELKARTEK as the projects ELPIVE (KK-2019/0006) and ENSOL 2 (KK-2020/00077), by the Government of the Basque Country within the fund for research groups of the Basque University system IT978-16, by the Government of Spain through the Agencia Estatal de Investigación Project DPI2017-85404-P, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the Project 2017 SGR 872

A methodology to determine reliability issues in automotive SiC power modules combining 1D and 3D thermal simulations under driving cycle profiles

Current environmental concerns and fuel scarcity are leading to the progressive introduction of Electric Vehicles (EV) in the global fleet vehicle population. This requires significant design and research efforts from scientific community and industry to provide reliable automotive electric propulsion systems. The power modules used for automotive traction inverters can be considered as central elements of such systems. As they are subject to high electro-thermal stress during operation, Design-for-Reliability (DfR) approaches should be adopted. Thus, accurate models for electro-thermal simulations are relevant since the early design stages. However, such simulations become highly time consuming and complex when accurate thermal characterization through standardized or real driving conditions needs to be provided. In this context, this work proposes a simulation methodology that combines real-time simulation for electro-thermal characterization of the whole EV propulsion system, using a 1D equivalent thermal impedance circuit, in conjunction with 3D FEM thermal simulation. In this way, an accurate thermal characterization of the power module under driving cycles with long duration (of hundreds of seconds) can be obtained without computing heavy 3D FEM simulations. The proposed procedure allows to simplify and speed up the early design stages while maintaining high accuracy in the results.This work has been supported by the Department of Education, Linguistic Policy and Culture of the Basque Government within the fund for research groups of the Basque university system IT978-16, by the Government of the Basque Country within the research program ELKARTEK as the project ENSOL (KK-2018/00040), and by the program to support the education of researches of the Basque Country PRE_2017_2_0008