Editorial: The Only Constant is Change … and Thermal Standards

The current millennium has been marked by great change in so many areas — political, economic, cultural, technological, climatic … and the list goes on. I, as I’m sure many of you, often look for things that persist in a familiar form despite the flux of events that surround us.
We often can count on our personal relationships within families, friends, and communities to help anchor us in challenging times. In addition to these sources of stability, many of us find moral support in our professional organizations. Like veterans of past battles, members of IEEE or ASME, among others, trade technological war stories at their conferences and committee meetings.
While I participate in these sorts of meetings and genuinely enjoy such professional relationships, I derive particular satisfaction from being associated with the JEDEC JC-15 Thermal Standards Committee. I’ve participated in this committee for nearly 20 years and have had the privilege of serving as its chairman for over 10.
The charter of this committee specifies its primary mission as being devoted to the thermal characterization of semiconductor devices at the individual package level. Other areas, such as those dealing with heat sinks, multi-package printed circuit boards, and convective fluid flow characterization, are relevant to this mission insofar as they represent aspects of the heat transfer environment for individual component packages.
Individuals participating on the committee are delegated by member companies. These companies represent a variety of sectors in the electronics industry: semiconductor, packaging, systems, and thermal test hardware and analysis software.
Over its history, the agenda of the committee has adapted to the evolving needs of the industry. A key ingredient in this process has always been the motivation and passion of individual committee members in championing initiatives important to their companies and to themselves, personally.
Early on, the main focus of the committee was to create standards for thermal testing that would lead to the generation of thermal performance values for packages that represented a consistent methodology across the industry.
They were generated by a process in accord with the most demanding provision of the committee’s charter, “These standards shall be meaningful, consistent, and shall be proven to be scientifically sound.” Hence the draft standards were subjected to evaluation and refinement using both thermal simulation and round-robin testing. This process led to the identification of the test board construction as being the most significant factor affecting the reproducibility of thermal test results. The result is that, at present, roughly half of the thermal test standards are devoted to the details of test board design to accommodate the many different types of IC packages on the market today.
Since then the committee has expanded its scope to deal with compact thermal models, multi-chip package testing, transient testing, and, most recently, with the testing of lighting LEDs. As a measure of the quality of this work, many papers have been published by committee members, detailing the testing and analysis that went into the generation of the various standards, several of which have received best paper awards.
Even though the technical focus has changed over time, the level of technical rigor that was demonstrated in those earlier standards continues to this day. It’s reassuring to see that, indeed, some things don’t change after all.
For more information, please consult the JEDEC website (www.jedec.org). All standards are available for download at no charge. Thermal test standards are searchable under the prefix, JESD51. For thermal modeling standards, the prefix is JESD15.