By Andras Poppe and Marta Rencz
The 30th THERMINIC (Thermal Investigations of ICs and Systems) workshop was held on 25-27 September 2024 in Toulouse, France at the Mercure Toulouse Centre Compans.
Jean-Pierre Fradin (Icam, France) and Patrick Tounsi (INSA Toulouse & LAAS – CNRS) as local organizers and co-program chairs of the 2024 THERMINIC did a great job: Over 110 participants enjoyed the high quality presentations: the event offered a comprehensive scientific program that featured 3 keynote presentations, 1 short course, and 34 oral and 20 poster presentations that were organized into 10 technical and 2 poster sessions. A highlight of the workshop was its strong international representation, with participants from 22 countries, more than 70 percent of them from industry. This diverse attendance fostered productive exchanges among professionals addressing thermal challenges in electronic components, leading to valuable discussions and new collaborations.
The THERMINIC Workshop started as an open, international dissemination and discussion forum of THERMINIC Project (1993-1997). After this first workshop, Therminic became an international event for the electronics cooling and thermal engineering community within the electronics industry, having been organized in many different European cities, including Paris, Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Dublin, Leuven, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Nice, etc. During its 30 years of history, THERMINIC Workshops have enabled many generations of young engineers to be engaged in the work. This remained the case for the 30th THERMINIC Workshop in Toulouse, where many young researchers, both from academia and industry, gathered from all over the world.
As a tradition established in the past decade, the day before the start of THERMINIC was dedicated to a short course. This year Wendy Luiten (WLC) had an excellent course on “Simulation Driven Thermal Design Optimization and Failure Rate Estimation”.
Toulouse is Europe’s aerospace capital. This was reflected in the special flavor of the workshop. Besides an exceptional gala dinner on the second day at the Cité de l’Espace (Space City), which provided a perfect setting for networking with colleagues, the workshop program included two keynote talks from the aerospace industry. The first day of the workshop kicked off with the keynote talk of Frederic Michard, from Thales Alenia Space, titled “Satellite Thermal Control Overview and Challenges”. The second day started with the joint keynote presentation of Hélène Calmels, Frédéric Marchetto and Werner De Rammelaere from Airbus, titled “Airbus Systems Roadmap and the Associated Thermal Challenges for Electronic Equipment”.
Power electronics is a hot topic in electronics cooling, and the third keynote talk of this year’s THERMINIC, given by Jerome Hélie from Vitesco, addressed this topic: “Wide Band Gap Integration for Automotive Power Electronic Applications.”
Following the keynote talk, the first day continued with oral sessions dealing with power electronics and design & simulation, accompanied by a poster introduction session during which authors of 9 posters invited participants to their posters displayed in the foyer of the conference room. The first day finished with a cocktail reception on board a ship cruising on the Garonne River, providing special views of some of the historic sights of Toulouse.
On the second day, after the keynote talk, the focus of the technical sessions shifted to thermal measurements and was covered in three sessions with 10 oral presentations in total. Further oral presentations dealt with two-phase cooling, aimed primarily at power electronics applications. During the second poster introduction and poster viewing session, 10 additional poster contributions were presented.
Following the pattern of the 29th THERMINIC Workshop held in Budapest (Hungary), the third day of the 2024 workshop started with a special session dedicated to the European research project AI-TWILIGHT, with 3 oral presentations that provided insight into the project results, related to the thermal, reliability and lifetime measuring and modeling aspects of power LEDs. The program continued with a second oral session on two-phase cooling. The technical program finished in the afternoon with an oral session on innovative cooling solutions.
The workshop closed by announcing the best paper, the best poster and the best young researcher awards to the presenters. In addition to diplomas, winners of these awards received gifts, state of the art electronics, that were provided by Huawei.
This year’s Best Paper Award was given to Dominique Carisetti and his colleagues from Thales Research and Technology for their paper on “2D Materials for Thermal Raman Measurements on Power Electronic Devices”. Ciro Scognamillo and his colleagues from the University Federico II, Napoli, Italy won the Best Poster Award for their poster presentation “Numerical Investigation on the Thermal Resistance and Assembly Cost in SSC and DSC Power Modules”. The Best Young Researcher Award went to Olympia Axelou and her colleagues from the University of Thessaly, Greece, for their paper “ATARI: Advanced Thermomigration Analysis for Reliability-Aware Interconnects.”
The closing ceremony of the 2024 30th THERMINIC Workshop followed the traditional announcement of the next event: the 31st THERMINIC Workshop (2025) will be held in Naples, Italy. Details on the 2025 event will be provided at therminic2025.eu.
On the first two days, the technical program of the THERMINIC Workshop was enriched by presentations of some of the workshop’s sponsors. This year’s THERMINIC Workshop was supported by Huawei, NANOTEST, ST Microelectronics and La Region Occitane Pyrénées-Méditerranée. The proceedings of the 2024 30th THERMINIC Workshop, including the presented contributed papers, are available in the IEEEXPlore database: ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/10732028/proceeding
The THERMINIC committee, following the traditions of the workshop, arranged a special journal issue dedicated to the 2023 and 2024 THERMINIC Workshops. This special issue of the open access journal Energies (2023 SCI ranking: Q1 in engineering) welcomes new journal papers that are significantly extended, derived versions of the contributions presented at the 2023 and 2024 workshops but the guest editors of this special issue also welcome other contributions that are within the scope of the THERMINIC Workshops. The call for this special issue is available at therminic2024.eu/submission/
Thermal Challenges for Electronic Equipment”
Fradin
