Thermal impedance model of high power IGBT modules considering heat coupling effects

Thermal loading of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) modules is important for the reliability performance of power electronic systems, thus the thermal information of critical points inside module like junction temperature must be accurately modeled and predicted. Usually in the existing thermal models, only the self-heating effects of the chips are taken into account, while the thermal coupling effects among chips are less considered. This could result in inaccurate temperature estimation, especially in the high power IGBT modules where the chips are allocated closely to each other with large amount of heat generated. In this paper, both the self-heating and heat-coupling effects in the of IGBT module are investigated based on Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation, a new thermal impedance model is thereby proposed to better describe the temperature distribution inside IGBT modules. It is concluded that the heat coupling between IGBT and diode chips strongly influence the temperature distribution inside IGBT module, and this effect can be properly modeled/predicted by the proposed thermal impedance model.