Fundamental Knowledge Thrust: Thermal-Mechanical Integration (TMI)

Leader: Elaine Scott, Virginia Tech

The overall goal of the TMI thrust is to develop integrated cooling technologies and assess fundamental cooling limitations. The research focuses include the development of 1) multi-level, multi-physical analysis tools and experimental techniques to determine the limitations of performance, 2) integrated thermal management technologies, and 3) methodologies to characterize thermo-mechanical failure mechanisms. Fig. 7(a) shows the active IPEM thermal modeling and test result comparison. The figure below shows the concept of integrated double-sided cooling based on the CPES Embedded Power packaging technology, which without using bond wires, allows for the possibility of double-sided cooling by soldering an additional DBC substrate on top of the metallization layer. It was shown that the use of double-sided cooling with heat sinks on both top and bottom substrates improved thermal performance by 62%.

Thermal modeling of IPEM	Integrated double-sided cooling based on embedded power packaging