Low thermal resistance packaging for high power electronics

Abstract

Alumina and aluminum nitride substrates are routinely used in micro-electronic packaging where large quantity of heat needs to be dissipated, such as in LED packaging, high power electronics and laser packaging. Heat management in high power electronics or LED's is crucial for their lifespan and reliability. The ever-increasing need for higher power keeps challenging the packaging engineers to become more sophisticated in their packaging. With the availability of a 40 μm thick, high thermal conductivity ribbon alumina from Corning, the options available for packaging engineers has widened. This product has very high dielectric breakdown (~10kV at 40 μm thick), high thermal conductivity (>36 W/mK) and is rugged enough to be handled (with components attached) during packaging. These characteristics make ribbon alumina a cost-effective alternative to incumbent materials such as thick aluminum nitride, for use in high power microelectronics packaging. In this paper, high power LED and IGBT modules are modeled using commercially available code from ANSYS®. A geometry representative of typical LED packaging and IGBT packaging is constructed with Ansys Design Modeler platform and the allied meshing is done employing in-built Meshing tool in ANSYS Workbench®. We show that packaging with ~40 μm ribbon alumina delivers performance on par with or better than packaging with thicker aluminum nitride substrates.