Double-Sided Liquid Cooling for Power Semiconductor Devices Using Embedded Power Technology

Power electronics is a constantly growing and demanding technical field. Consumer demand and developing technologies have made the improvement of power density a primary emphasis of research for this area. Power semiconductors present some of the major challenges for increasing system level power density due to high loss density and interconnection requirements. Advanced cooling schemes, such as double-sided, forced liquid convection or multi-phase flow, can be implemented with non-wire bond packaging to improve thermal management while maintaining proper electrical performance. Embedded power is one such packaging technology, which provides a compact structure for interface of power semiconductor to fluid flow. The objective of this work was to identify the potential of implementing embedded power packaging with double-sided forced liquid convection. Physics based, electro-thermal models were first used to predict the improvement in heat transfer of double-sided, forced liquid convection with embedded power packaging over single-sided liquid cooled wire bond based packaging. A liquid module test bed was designed and constructed based on the electro-thermal models, which could be interfaced with high power MOSFET based samples implementing various packaging technologies. Experiments were used to verify the model predictions and identify practical limitations of high flow rate, double-sided liquid cooling with embedded power. An improvement of 45% to 60% in total junction to case thermal resistance is shown for embedded power packaging with double-sided liquid cooling for water flow rates between 0.25 and 4.5 gal/min.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Charboneau, Bryan Charles

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Boroyevich, Dushan

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Wang, Fei Fred
• van Wyk, Daan
• Scott, Elaine P.

• semiconductor packaging
• double-sided cooling
• liquid convection

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-04252006-044651

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/31907