Modeling Minority Carriers Related Capacitive Effects for Transient Substrate Currents in Smart Power ICs

This paper presents an extended model for transient and ac circuit-level simulation of minority carriers propagation through the substrate of smart power integrated circuits (ICs). A p-n junction and a diffusion resistor with capacitive components are proposed to efficiently simulate transient parasitic coupled currents in high-power stages. From a general chip layout, an equivalent substrate network including capacitive effects (junction and diffusion capacitances) can be extracted and parasitic bipolar transistor can be simulated for the first time in transient operation by circuit simulators once the minority carriers continuity conditions are satisfied. This paper shows simulation results of the implemented models in good agreement with those obtained from technology computer-aided design. This implies that transient layout dependent mechanisms between high-voltage aggressor wells and low-voltage victims can be verified in early stages of IC design flow.