Thermal Strain In Semiconductor Packages, Part I
Introduction Silicon became the semiconductor of choice for ICs because of its electrical properties, not because of its mechanical properties. In the earliest days of ICs when chips were small and...
View ArticleThermal Strain in Semiconductor Packages, Part II
Introduction This Calculation Corner continues Part I, published in the previous issue [1]. Part I described the construction of a typical flip-chip package configuration for high-power chips,...
View ArticleHeat Spreading Calculations Using Thermal Circuit Elements
Heat Spreading Calculations Using Thermal Circuit Elements Bruce Guenin, Associate Technical Editor Introduction In electronics cooling applications, there are numerous changes of scale from the chip...
View ArticlePower Map Calculations Using Image Sources and Superposition
Introduction In the past, thermal engineers were content to calculate a single junction temperature in the thermal characterization of an integrated circuit chip in a package. In recent years, as power...
View ArticleThe Audacity of Engineering
At the time of this writing (mid-November), it appears that significant progress has been made toward avoiding a global financial collapse and that we now have a good chance of avoiding that fate....
View ArticleWhen Moore Is Less: Exploring the 3rd Dimension in IC Packaging
Introduction As consumers of electronics we have become spoiled. We not only expect our electronic devices to get smaller, faster, more functional, cheaper, more interconnected, and more reliable, we...
View ArticleThe Uses of Simplicity in Thermal Analysis
Bruce Guenin, PhD Editor-in-Chief, Summer 2010 Issue The dramatic trajectory of Moore’s law has produced a number of changes in key areas of technology that are critical to our industry: 1) greater...
View ArticleCalculation Corner: Thermal Interactions Between High-Power Packages and Heat...
Bruce Guenin, PhD Associate Technical Editor The need to accommodate increasing chip power has led to improved package and heat sink designs having much lower thermal resistance values than previously....
View ArticleCalculation Corner: Thermal Interactions Between High-Power Packages and Heat...
These days, many thermal engineers face the challenge of defining effective heat sink cooling solutions for high power processors and ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). The usual...
View ArticleThermal Facts & Fairy Tales: Whatever Happened to the Predicted Data Center...
As the title indicates, since the middle of the last decade, there have been very pessimistic projections regarding the growth of the total annual energy used by data centers in the U.S. One of them...
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