1.1 Description and Motivation

Smart power integrated circuits (ICs) which monolithically integrated low-loss power devices and control circuitry have attracted much attention in a wide variety of applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. These ICs improve the reliability, reduce the volume and weight, and increase the efficiency of a system. Considerable effort has been put into the development of smart power devices for automotive electronics, computer peripheral appliances, and portable equipment, such as cellular phones, video cameras, etc. Commonly used smart power devices are the lateral double diffused MOS transistors (LDMOSFETs) and lateral insulated gate bipolar transistors (LIGBTs) implemented in bulk silicon or SOI (Silicon on Insulator) [9,10,11,12,13,14]. The main issues in the development of these devices are to obtain the best trade-off between specific on-resistance $R_\mathrm{sp}$ and breakdown voltage BV, and to shrink the feature size without degrading device characteristics. Over the past decade a variety of new power semiconductors has been suggested and commercialized [15,16,17].

Device simulation with TCAD (technology computer-aided design) tools has proven to play an important role for the design engineers and researchers to analyze, characterize, and develop new devices [18,19,20,21]. It saves time and lowers the cost of designing devices when compared to the experimental approach. In addition, it allows to see physical effects clearly in the semiconductor devices concerning new device concepts. Therefore, clear understanding of TCAD used for the analysis of power semiconductors is essential to obtain an accurate and reliable simulation result.

This work deals with novel power semiconductor concepts for smart power applications. Several new device structures are suggested and studied to improve the device characteristics related to traditional power devices. Two- and three-dimensional device simulations are performed to study new device concepts. In this thesis MINIMOS-NT [22,23,24,25], a general purpose device simulator, is used for the simulation of established and newly proposed power semiconductor devices.