Thermo-mechanical simulation of the metal-semiconductor structures of power integrated circuits

Thermo-mechanical stress accumulation in the power electronic integrated circuit (PIC) devices influences their lifetime and reliability. In order to determine both the temperature and the stress accumulation, numerical simulation is a very important tool in the design of PIC devices for quantifying and enhancing their lifetime and reliability. An open source solution integrated in Salome-Meca and Code_Aster based on the finite element method (FEM) is used in this paper to analyze the thermo-mechanical behavior on a simple metal-semiconductor structure, which is typically found in a PIC. The computational time and accuracy of the simulations results is improved by finding the optimal mesh configuration. A convergence study is computed for five different cases by progressively reducing the size of the discretization elements (hence, increasing the number of mesh elements) in the area of interest. The results for an optimal relative error and computational time are compared with the results obtained using the commercial software Comsol. The simulated mechanical stress is compared with similar results reported in literature.