Calculation Corner Bruce Guenin, Assoc. Technical Editor Introduction These days, many thermal engineers face the challenge of defining effective heat sink cooling solutions for high power processors and ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). The usual practice would be to calculate a value of ΘJA (junction-to-air thermal resistance) for the … [Read more...]
The Junction-to-Case Thermal Resistance: A One-Dimensional Underachiever in a Three-dimensional, Conjugate Heat Transfer World
INTRODUCTION As integrated circuits were becoming more widespread in the 1980’s, most of the developmental problems had to do the with electrical operation of the devices and not so much on cooling them, due to low power levels. It was the electrical engineers who did the functional testing, an activity that ultimately expanded to include thermal testing. Even the thermal … [Read more...]
Use of the Monte Carlo Method in Packaging Thermal Calculations
INTRODUCTION The state of the art in performing thermal calculations in our industry is very advanced. However, how applicable the results of a calculation are to the real-world performance of a packaging or an active cooling component depends on the quality of the data characterizing these various components. In the real world of manufacturing, such characterization … [Read more...]
Strategies for the Thermal Modeling of Metal Traces on Printed Circuit Boards
Bruce Guenin, Assoc. Technical Editor Introduction As integrated circuit (IC) devices get more complex, the interconnections between them provided by printed circuit boards (PCBs) get more complicated as well. Thermal simulation software tools are getting more capable of importing PCB layouts and automating the process of creating a model of the PCB whose local thermal … [Read more...]
Use of JEDEC Thermal Metrics in Calculating Chip Temperatures (without Attached Heat Sinks)
Bruce Guenin Assoc. Technical Editor, Electronics Cooling INTRODUCTION JEDEC single-chip package thermal metrics are widely used as a means of characterizing the thermal performance of semiconductor packages. They correlate the peak temperature of a uniformly-heated semiconductor chip (the junction temperature, TJ) with the temperature of a specified region along the heat … [Read more...]
