Integrated Thermal Management for a High-Power-Density Silicon Carbide Power Module With Die-Level Heat Flux Over 1000 W/cm²

As the continuous miniaturization of silicon carbide (SiC) devices promotes the die-level heat flux up to 1 kW/cm2, efficient thermal management is critical for the current load and reliability of power electronics. This work describes the design, fabrication, and performance of an integrated-cooling strategy for power electronics. The strategy includes a low thermal resistance package (directly bonded heat sinks by nanosilver sintering) and an integrated convective cooling approach [manifold microchannels (MMCs)]. After careful numerical optimization, three prototypes of SiC power modules were then fabricated to characterize their performance. The final design has demonstrated a six-chip compact package (~30 cm3, including heat sink and power devices), and heat fluxes over 1000 W/cm2 (total heat loss 1500 W) were dissipated with an ultralow thermal resistance of 9.85 mm<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}\cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula>kW-1 at a flowrate of 2.16 L/min. A further benchmark comparison indicated that the microchannel cooling could simultaneously provide 80% and 83% lower thermal resistance and pumping power, respectively, than the conventional liquid-cooled power modules. Besides, this integrated-cooling architecture could enable two times higher output current through a fully compatible packaging process, which could provide a promising solution for the reliable compact integration of SiC devices.