Integrating Heat Sinks into a 3D Co-Design Network Model for Quick Parametric Analysis

摘要

Co-design and co-engineering have the potential to significantly advance the state of the art of electronics packaging. A key enabling capability of co-design are design tools which allow quick parametric design across various design spaces. ARL's ParaPower tool allows quick parametric thermo-mechanical design analysis of most rectilinear designs using a 3D thermal resistor network for both steady-state and transient heat loads. This work expands the ParaPower capabilities by allowing internal boundary cavity (IBC) features into the network structure. IBCs can be placed anywhere in the 3D rectilinear geometry and include two distinct boundary parameters: (1) a surface heat transfer coefficient and (2) an ambient temperature. Adding the IBC functionality to the network model significantly increases the design flexibility by permitting internal convection paths, non-rectilinear geometries, and heat sink geometry evaluation. This paper presents the IBC equations and illustrates the parametric capability by evaluating the effects of convection coefficient and heat sink material. The ability to quickly assess the thermal and stress effects of a wide variety of power module design parameters during the initial design process - with reasonable results and without the complexity of a full FEA analysis - can significantly improve the final design.