An enhanced BSIM modeling framework for selfheating aware circuit design

Abstract. This work proposes a modeling framework to enhance the industry-standard BSIM4 MOSFET models with capabilities for coupled electro-thermal simulations. An automated simulation environment extracts thermal information from model data as provided by the semiconductor foundry. The standard BSIM4 model is enhanced with a Verilog-A based wrapper module, adding thermal nodes which can be connected to a thermal-equivalent RC network. The proposed framework allows a fully automated extraction process based on the netlist of the top-level design and the model library. A numerical analysis tool is used to control the extraction flow and to obtain all required parameters. The framework is used to model self-heating effects on a fully integrated class A/AB power amplifier (PA) designed in a standard 65 nm CMOS process. The PA is driven with +30 dBm output power, leading to an average temperature rise of approximately 40 °C over ambient temperature.