Thermal Optimization and Characterization of SiC-Based High Power Electronics Packages With Advanced Thermal Design

A single-phase high power electronics package is designed and developed in this paper. The developed power package achieves a significant thermal performance improvement compared with the conventional wire-bonded power package. The improvement is attributed to two features of the package design. First, the SiC chips are embedded into the active metal brazed (AMB) substrates with specially designed cavities, as such the heat transfer path from the embedded SiC chips to the liquid-cooled heat sink attached to the bottom side of the AMB substrate is shortened. Hence, the thermal performance of the package is improved. Moreover, customized copper clips are introduced as the electrical interconnections between the SiC chips and the top metal layer of the substrate at the same level, and the top surface of the power package remain flat. As such another heat sink can be added to the top side of the package to further improve the thermal performance of the power package through the double-side cooling (DSC) scheme. The simulation results show that the junction-to-case thermal resistance (Theta JC) of the optimized power package is about 50% less than the Theta JC of the conventional wire-bonded power package with the same package size and the same power rate. Further applying the DSC scheme to the proposed power package, which is not suitable to the conventional wire-bonded power package, the Theta JC of the proposed power package reduces another 20%. In addition, the effects of the core layer (i.e., material and thickness) and the metal layer (i.e., materials and thicknesses) of the AMB substrate, as well as the die attach (i.e., material and thickness) on the Theta JC of the proposed power package are investigated systematically. As such the thermal performance of the power inverter package is further elaborated. Finally, the thermally enhanced power package is fabricated and assembled. Thermal characterization has been conducted, and the thermal performance of the developed power package has been evaluated. The simulation results and characterization results match well with each other.