Electrothermal reduced equivalents of highly integrated electronic systems with multi-port positive fraction foster expansion

An effective strategy is proposed for the extraction of reduced electrical equivalents of dynamic thermal models for electronic systems, based on well-established electrical macro-modeling techniques. Properly defined self-heating and mutual thermal impedances of the embedded active elements - preliminarily evaluated via 3-D thermal simulations - are reduced with passive identification methods, and equivalent electrical models are generated with a Foster multi-port synthesis. The technique is devised to determine a compact thermal feedback network, in a form well suited for commercial circuit simulation environments, thus allowing for a coupled electrothermal analysis.