Lin Tingyou, Ho Yingchieh, Su Chauchin
Institute of Communications Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan.
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Dong-Hwa University, Hualien 97401, Taiwan.
Sensors (Basel). 2017 Jun 15;17(6):1397. doi: 10.3390/s17061397.
This paper presents a method of thermal balancing for monolithic power integrated circuits (ICs). An on-chip temperature monitoring sensor that consists of a poly resistor strip in each of multiple parallel MOSFET banks is developed. A temperature-to-frequency converter (TFC) is proposed to quantize on-chip temperature. A pulse-width-modulation (PWM) methodology is developed to balance the channel temperature based on the quantization. The modulated PWM pulses control the hottest of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) bank to reduce its power dissipation and heat generation. A test chip with eight parallel MOSFET banks is fabricated in TSMC 0.25 μm HV BCD processes, and total area is 900 × 914 μm². The maximal temperature variation among the eight banks can reduce to 2.8 °C by the proposed thermal balancing system from 9.5 °C with 1.5 W dissipation. As a result, our proposed system improves the lifetime of a power MOSFET by 20%.
本文提出了一种用于单片功率集成电路（IC）的热平衡方法。开发了一种片上温度监测传感器，它由多个并行MOSFET组中的每一组中的一个多晶硅电阻条组成。提出了一种温度-频率转换器（TFC）来量化片上温度。开发了一种脉宽调制（PWM）方法，基于量化来平衡沟道温度。调制后的PWM脉冲控制金属氧化物半导体场效应晶体管（MOSFET）组中最热的一组，以降低其功耗和发热。采用台积电0.25μm HV BCD工艺制造了一个具有八个并行MOSFET组的测试芯片，总面积为900×914μm²。通过所提出的热平衡系统，在1.5W功耗下，八个组之间的最大温度变化可从9.5°C降至2.8°C。结果，我们提出的系统将功率MOSFET的寿命提高了20%。
