Heat Spreading Calculations Using Thermal Circuit Elements Bruce Guenin, Associate Technical Editor Introduction In electronics cooling applications, there are numerous changes of scale from the chip level to the system level. This is characteristic of the signaling, power, and thermal infrastructures in electronic systems. Because of this, it is inevitable that the heat flow … [Read more...]
Thermal Strain in Semiconductor Packages, Part II
Introduction This Calculation Corner continues Part I, published in the previous issue [1]. Part I described the construction of a typical flip-chip package configuration for high-power chips, consisting of a laminate assembly of materials adhesively bonded together and having different Coefficients of Thermal Expansion (CTE). The process of bonding these different materials … [Read more...]
Compact thermal modeling in electronics design
Compact thermal modeling in electronics design Sarang Shidore Flomerics Inc Introduction The challenge of accurately predicting junction temperatures of IC components in system-level CFD simulations has engaged the engineering community for a number of years. The primary challenge has been that near-exact physical models of such components (known as detailed thermal models, or … [Read more...]
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Heatsink
Introduction When faced with the task of calculating the temperature of an IC in a package, which has an external heat sink mounted to it, a thermal engineer usually obtains a values of three thermal resistances: ΘJC , the junction-to-case thermal resistance for the package, ΘCS , the case-to-sink thermal resistance representing the thermal interface material (TIM) between the … [Read more...]
Entrance Effects For Heat Flow Into A Multi-Layer Printed Circuit Board
Introduction Since their introduction, multilayer printed circuit boards have provided a significant benefit to the thermal management of IC packages. As is widely recognized, the power and ground planes in these boards function as fins and spread the heat beyond the package footprint and enhance heat transfer to the air. Heat can flow into these planes by conduction either … [Read more...]
