Heat Dissipation of Semiconductor Packages

Heat dissipation of semiconductor packages has become one of the limiting factors in miniaturization. One of the biggest concerns of circuit designers is to reduce power that is continuously increasing due to increasing bandwidths. The increasing power results in increasing temperature in the chip that first just modifies, later destroys the operation of the circuit, if the heat is not appropriately lead out of the chip. The heat transfer to the outside world can be improved by better heat sinks, higher air velocities and liquid cooling if the application allows it. But the heat first has to reach the surface of the package, and the efficiency of this heat transfer depends on the conductivity of the package itself, and the interface thermal resistance that is defined as the sum of the thermal resistance of the interface material (TIM) plus the contact resistances.

Characterization of thermal properties of Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs) has gained increasing importance as the relative percentage of overall semiconductor package material thermal resistance attributed to the TIMs has increased. The development of new TIM materials has resulted in materials with very high performance and in certain instances with very thin in-situ application thickness, giving very small thermal resistance values.

A team of experienced product engineers is ready to answer any of your thermal technical questions