Simple method to simulate diode selfheating using spice

Spice-aided modelling of the UC3842 current mode PWM controller with selfheating taken into account

“…The first papers on SPICE electrothermal analyses of simple electronic circuits were published on the turn of 90s of the previous century [9][10][11][12]. So far, the electrothermal models of such devices as: bipolar transistors [10,13,14], power Darlington transistors [15], power MOS transistors [8,[16][17][18], SCRs [19] as well as monolithic voltage regulators [20,21] have been formulated for SPICE.…”

“…There is a method of the separated variables [11,21,22], in which equations describing the device current-voltage characteristics at fixed temperature values and the dependence of the junction temperature at fixed power values are solved alternately. On the other hand, there is also a method of common variables [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][23][24][25][26][27], in which these equations are solved simultaneously. Note, that using the method of separate variables, the junction temperature values (in the successive iteration steps) are calculated by other computer programs, e.g.…”

“…Although this tool is designed for the isothermal analyses with temperature treated as a fixed value, there are some successful attempts of adapting SPICE to electrothermal analyses, e.g. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…The majority of electrothermal models of semiconductor devices [9,10,[12][13][14]16,18,[23][24][25]27] and ICs [16,21] intended for SPICE belong to the class of compact electrothermal models described by one internal temperature of the device estimated on the basis of the transient thermal impedance of the considered device. Apart from this, there are device electrothermal models in which more than one internal temperature is taken into account.…”

“…The global electrothermal models of any device consists of the proper controlled sources [8][9][10][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]26,27] the hybrid electrothermal models are composed of the device isothermal built-in SPICE models and the joined controlled sources describing the changes of the device terminal voltages and currents caused by selfheating [10,24].…”