Physical Electro-Thermal Model for the Design of Schottky Diode-Based Circuits

Thermal management has become an important issue in the design of Schottky diode-based circuits for high power applications. This work presents a physics-based numerical electro-thermal model for Schottky diodes capable of evaluating the thermal effects on the electrical performance of devices and circuits. The advantages of this model are the inclusion of temperature-dependent material parameters, the capability to calculate internal temperature distributions, and the identification of regions where heat is generated, providing useful information for device design and circuit reliability. The developed electro-thermal model is integrated into a circuit simulator in order to provide a tool which can be used to analyze, design and optimize Schottky diode-based circuits for high power operation. This tool has been validated with a 200 GHz doubler from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL-NASA). A better agreement with measurement results at high input powers is obtained with our model compared with other previous models reported in the literature due to the self-consistent implementation of the temperature-dependency of physical parameters like electron mobility and saturation velocity.