A Study on Thermal Performance Enhancement for Multi-Chip Power µModules

Multi-chip power µModules (micromodule) are widely used in modern electronics systems. Due to high power consumption of µModules, a good packaging design is critical to meet thermal performance requirement for a successful system design. This paper presents a µModule thermal performance study through thermal resistance analysis with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software. Multi-chip thermal resistance is evaluated to better understand the heat flow path. To achieve better thermal performance in actual working environments, several key factors are studied, including package material type, substrate design and internal heat spreader. For internal heat spreaders, thermal gain under different system conditions is investigated. Design optimization is presented in this paper based on prevailing packaging material options and manufacturing capabilities. Guidelines are provided for thermal performance optimization for multi-chip packages.