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...]
