Thermal Modelling and Management of Power Semiconductors for Transportation Electrification: A Review

The electrification of transportation pushes traction inverters, on-board chargers, and aircraft propulsion systems toward higher power density, increasingly enabled by wide-bandgap devices, thereby concentrating ever-larger heat fluxes on power semiconductor dies as package-level cooling nears its sustainable limit. Junction temperature is the resulting bottleneck: it caps the usable rating and, through the thermal cycling that fatigues module interconnects, governs reliability and service life. Managing junction temperature therefore requires a coupled chain of processes spanning the device loss that generates the heat, the models that predict it, the parameters which these models require as input, the cooling that removes it, and the control that bounds its excursion. This review traces heat transfer along this chain, organizing each link by method class and comparing representative methods against the limitation that marks its open problem. The methods within each link are relatively mature, whereas the couplings between links and their validation against realistic missions are not. The cross-cutting gaps, among them sparse drive-cycle validation, weak coupling between electro-thermal and aging models, and the absent co-design of cooling and control, are consolidated into a forward research agenda.