Compact thermal network model of the electro-thermal system

Abstract

The accurate prediction of operating temperatures of temperature sensitive electronic parts at the component, package, board, and system level CFD simulations has engaged the engineering community for a number of years. The primary challenge has been that near-exact physical models of such components (known as detailed thermal models, or DTMs) are difficult or implement directly in system designs due toe the wide disparity in length scales involved, which results in large computational inefficiencies. A compact thermal model (CTM) attempts to solve this problem by taking a detailed model and extracting an abstracted, far less grid intensive representation that is still able to preserve accuracy in predicting the temperatures at key points in the package, such as the junction. In this paper, we present a compact thermal network model to represent the multi dimensional heat flow system as a network based on the thermal interface material (TIM) measurement apparatus. In order to estimate the heat flow division on each heat transfer path, thermal impedance and temperature difference between junction node and adjacent node are used. This model also can be extended to estimate the thermal interface resistance in joints and heat transfer coefficient variation of the multidimensional heat flow system.