Comprehensive design solutions for wide bandgap power electronics

Wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors hold great promise to significantly outperform and eventually replace traditional silicon-based power electronics (PE) technology. While there are research and development efforts in other WBG semiconductors, SiC and GaN have reached a level of maturity that allows their use in PE applications, and industry must overcome numerous challenges including high material and manufacturing costs, reliably manufacturing these devices at high volumes, and competitive costs across the full range of PE applications. Effective process and device simulations for WBG semiconductors will be essential to bridge these gaps. In this paper, we talk about several types of power devices and the methods used to design and analyze them. It is essential to have tools that can model the complex and diverse structures found in these devices, and then to simulate them to provide insight into their performance and behavior. These tools need to rely on advanced physics modeling that often goes down to the quantum mechanical level, and work at the macro level for predicting I-V, thermal, and stress parameters.