Nowadays, the main way to improve power density is increasing the junction temperature of semiconductor devices and as a result, increasing the temperature of the heat sink. This results in a lower efficiency due to the high temperature caused by increasing power losses. To solve this problem, it’s possible to develop the heat sink for a specific system, or to optimize existing heat sink profiles. This paper presents an FEM-analysis describing thermal behavior of a bidirectional switch used in a direct matrix converter.

Keywords: bidirectional switch, heat exchange, thermal behavior, finite element method