A SPICE behavioural model of PowerMESH/spl trade/ IGBTs

A new, very promising family of IGBTs has been recently carried out in "mesh overlay" technology. If compared with previous generations of IGBTs, new PowerMESH devices show some key improvements such as lower V/sub CE(SAT)/, higher current capability, lower switching times and higher latch up immunity. In this paper a SPICE model for PowerMESH IGBT devices is developed exploiting a new modeling method based on neural networks, in an effort to obtain an optimal trade off among precision, complexity of parameter identification procedures and computational speed. The proposed approach leads to the development of a PSPICE behavioral model of PowerMesh IGBTs including temperature effects both on steady state characteristics and dynamic features. Such a model can be effectively used in standard circuital simulators in order to simulate complex power converters. The proposed approach can be also applied to predict the key features of non existing devices, on the basis of the models of elements of the same family.