In the majority of applications involving plastic surface-mount packages, most of the heat generated by integrated circuits will flow to the printed circuit board (PCB) by way of the package leads and then to In higher-power applications it is often necessary to attach a heat sink to the top of the package to keep the junction temperature of the chip within specified limits. … [Read more...]
Determining the junction temperature in a plastic semiconductor package, part 1
One of the primary tasks of the thermal engineer is to determine the temperature of the junction (active circuitry on an integrated circuit) for the various packages in a system. Measurements performed in the industry-standard test environment are often used in this endeavor. The most common thermal metric [1,2] is the junction-to-air thermal resistance, JA (pronounced theta, … [Read more...]
Electrical temperature measurement using semiconductors
Introduction Semiconductor junctions offer many useful properties including inherentcharacteristics which are well suited to temperature measurement. Within theelectronics cooling arena, these properties form the basis for "theelectrical method of junction temperature measurement" and are used formeasurement of junction temperatures within operating semiconductor devices. They … [Read more...]
