Impact of nonlinearities on electronic device transient thermal responses

This paper investigates the influence of nonlinearities on electronic device thermal transient responses. The discussions in the paper are based on practical examples where thermal responses of a power device are recorded in various boundary conditions for different values of dissipated power. Then, the measurement results are analysed using the Network Identification by a Deconvolution method and the differences between particular cases are discussed in detail. The presented experimental results demonstrate that the nonlinearities due to the temperature dependence of thermal model parameters might have important influence on the results, especially when still air cooling is applied. In addition, in selected cases the simulations results obtained with compact thermal models were compared with measurements.