Date of Graduation

5-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Electrical Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Alan Mantooth

Committee Member

Yarui Peng

Second Committee Member

Yue Zhao

Third Committee Member

Morgan Ware

Keywords

Electronic design automation; Layout; Power converter; Power electronics; Power module

Abstract

The field of power electronics is undergoing rapid advancement that is driven by the need for further electrification in all aspects of power generation and transmission, transportation, and consumer goods. Recent advances in wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor technologies continue to push their adoption in systems with higher power densities and conversion efficiencies. However, the way in which the components of these systems are designed has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving landscape of their applications and often requires costly, manual design iteration. Therefore, new methods are needed to improve this design process. Packaging of power devices is a critical part of building a power conversion system. This is necessary to protect the devices from their environment while providing efficient electrical interconnection and heat rejection. By combining a plurality of devices, a module can be constructed that reduces electrical parasitics and thermal resistance while forming a functional unit. Combinations of these building blocks can be arranged into a wide variety of power converters for any given application. The hierarchical nature of this problem, while apparent, is conventionally tackled as independent systems with engineers constantly redrawing, simulating, and prototyping in a slow search for an optimal design. By contrast, the field of very large-scale circuit integration (VLSI) has solved many of these same problems decades ago. Crafting algorithms and software tools to create an electronic design automation (EDA) workflow contributed to the exponential, Moore’s law growth of microelectronics. Recently, software tools such as PowerSynth have been developed to bring EDA concepts to power electronics by rapidly evaluating and optimizing power module layouts for tradeoffs in electrical and thermal performance. This work further bridges the gap between power electronics and VLSI by applying classic design automation algorithms to power converter design. Novel ways of partitioning a converter design space are explored that couple concepts such as floorplanning with module layout synthesis to hierarchically combine switching cells in a way that minimizes interconnect parasitics while maximizing power density. This is accomplished through the development of a purpose-built placement and routing engine for power module design considering these metrics. Drawing from the fields of VLSI and computational geometry, valuable techniques are identified and evaluated toward the goal of automatic power converter design. Requirements and constraints for a converter system are defined with an annotated netlist file. The results are design files that can be readily used in other software tools for further analysis. Furthermore, the novel application of a circuit partitioning algorithm leads to the synthesis of non-standard module designs that are shown to impact overall converter volume and power density while minimizing interconnect parasitics. Importantly, the designs generated by this tool can be used directly in PowerSynth. So, while each synthesis run may produce tens of unique layout designs in a matter of minutes, each of these can be optimized in PowerSynth to rapidly generate hundreds of solutions on a Pareto frontier of tradeoffs in just as much time. These concepts are shown throughout this work with detailed examples and explanations.

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