By: Marta Rencz, Andras Poppe, and Genevieve Martin
The 29th issue of the THERMINIC (Thermal investigations of ICs and Systems) workshops was held on 27-29 September 2023 in Budapest, Hungary at the Budapest Marriott Hotel. Over 110 participants enjoyed the high quality presentations from 17 countries. About half of the participants came from the industry, half from the academia. This year’s major subject of the workshop was Testing and cooling solutions for power electronics.
Each day of the workshop was dedicated to a special theme and started with a keynote presentation given by industrial leaders, introducing the major subject of the day.
The first day’s papers dealing with thermal management and cooling solutions were presented and discussed in 2 oral and one interactive (poster) sessions. In addition, a vendor session introduced the industrial sponsor’s (Siemens, Bosch, Nanotest, Huawei) activities and offerings related to thermal management.
The first day’s keynote talk came from Bosch Hungary, given by Szilárd Szőke, with the title of “In Pursuit of Accuracy: Thermal Design Verification in Automotive Power Electronics”. It discussed the increased importance of thermal testing in various branches of automotive power electronics and the interplay of reliable thermal tests and thermal simulation, both being part of the same product development workflow.
The second day was dedicated to coupled field modelling and simulation. “Making Digital Twin Work” was the title of day 2 keynote talk, given by Prof. G. Q. Zhang from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, who is currently secretary-general of the IEEE International Technology Roadmap of Wide bandgap power semiconductors (ITRW). In his talk he presented the new challenges set by the European Chips Act, and gave an insight into the most burning questions of multi-level heterogeneous system integration and packaging. Prof. Zhang’s talk was closely related to two European research projects, PowerizeD – dealing with testing, modelling and lifetime prognostics issues of power electronics components (issues discussed during day 1 of the workshop), and AI-TWILIGHT – a project addressing similar topics in connection with LED based products, that were addressed in much details in a special session on the third day of the workshop.
On the second day the oral sessions discussed the Optimization, numerical analysis, machine learning questions of thermal design, followed by a session discussing the Advances in data processing of thermal transients and compact modelling and a session discussing New concepts for data center cooling.
The third day was dedicated to the thermal issues of solid state lighting devices and systems. The day’s keynote talk, “Challenges and Opportunities to Improve the Performance of LED Lighting” was presented by Dr László Balázs, a leading expert of horticultural lighting, from the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences who formerly has been working in the lighting industry for about two decades.
The first part of the day was dedicated to presenting the results of the AI-TWILIGHT (AI powered digital twin generation for the lighting industry) H2020 ECSEL project of the EU. The two oral sessions:
AI-TWILIGHT Session 1: Thermal, optical and power cycling testing and modelling of LED packages and AI-TWILIGHT Session 2: Modelling of LEDs presented the results achieved in the first 2 years at the different project partners. The morning was closed with other oral presentations within the subject of Thermal investigation of LEDs and PV cells.
In the afternoon a session with papers in the field of Thermal & reliability testing was closing the technical presentations.
The workshop was closed by announcing the best paper, the best poster and best young researcher awards to the presenters. The diplomas were accompanied with valuable gifts: the newest pieces of electronics were offered to the winners by Huawei.
