CITC presents at EuroSimE 2022

April 21, 2022 – On April 25, CITC’s Henry Martin will present his work on in-situ reliability monitoring of power packages using a Thermal Test Chip at EuroSimE. The 23rd International Conference on thermal, mechanical and multi-physics simulation and experiments in microelectronics and microsystems is held in Malta.

Thermal test chip

Henry will discuss the crucial need to meet stringent automotive standards and to better understand the critical failure mechanisms of high-power electronics to improve their reliability. To that end, he* developed an in-situ reliability monitoring setup. This is capable of actively measuring the thermal performance of a package during lifetime testing.

A Thermal Test Chip (TTC – depicted above) assembled into a Power Quad Flat No-lead (PQFN) package was employed as a test vehicle for non-destructive reliability assessment. The TTC comprises resistive heaters as a heat source and resistive temperature elements for measuring the thermal response.

Transient thermal behavior

The team evaluated the transient thermal behavior based on the contribution of a heat source to a temperature field. They measured the temperature distribution at multiple spatial positions. The experimental results provide insights into the thermal properties’ influence on the thermal behavior of the package.

A compact electro-thermal model based on analogies was developed to deconvolute and analyze the transient thermal measurements. The results of the compact model correlate with the experimental measurements, and the model’s accuracy was verified using finite element simulations. The development of such thermal characterization experiments and computationally inexpensive models assist in further understanding the impact of failures in advancing high-power density electronics.

More information

If you’d like to know more about Henry’s work or the full publication, please contact him per email.

*in this project, Henry worked together with Romina Sattari[2], Edsger Smits[1], Henk van Zeijl[2], Willem van Driel[2,3] and Kouchi Zhang[2].

[1] Chip Integration Technology Center
[2] Electronic Components, Technology & Materials (ECTM) – TU Delft
[3] Signify Research