Transient thermal measurement on nano-metallic sintered die-attach joints using a thermal test chip

Transient thermal measurement on nano-metallic sintered die-attach joints using a thermal test chip

Sattari, R. (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials)
Hu, D. (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials)
Liu, X. (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials; Southern University of Science and Technology of China)
van Zeijl, H.W. (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials)
Vollebregt, S. (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials)
Zhang, Kouchi (TU Delft Electronic Components, Technology and Materials)

2023

The rapid development of power electronics has challenged the thermal integrity of semiconductor packaging. Further developments in this domain can be supported significantly by utilizing fast and flexible thermal characteristic evaluation. This study employs the transient dual interface method (TDIM) to characterize and compare the thermal resistance of Ag- and Cu-sintered die-attach joints using an in-house developed thermal test chip (TTC). The proposed TTC with 82.5% active area achieves a temperature sensitivity of 12 Ω/K and maximum power of 360 W per cell, which are 50% and 44% higher than the state-of-the-art, respectively. The uniformity of the temperature distribution (1 °C at 68 W) is verified by infrared thermography. The cost-effective manufacturing process allows the design to be applied to any substrate, such as SiC or GaN. Ag and Cu sintering is performed to bond the TTC on a Cu substrate, and the junction-to-case thermal resistance of the sintered structures is extracted. The lowest junction-to-case thermal resistance of 0.144 K/W is measured for the device sintered using Ag paste. Meanwhile, the Cu sintered structure exhibits a comparable value of 0.158 K/W. The proposed TTC in combination with TDIM accelerates the introduction of novel and cost-effective materials such as Cu.

Power electronics
Sintered die-attach joints
Transient dual interface method
Thermal test chip
Junction-to-case thermal resistance
Infrared thermography

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1ed43c9e-5cda-4d8f-a13c-1d82ab3af91e

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2022.119503

2023-06-26

1359-4311

Applied Thermal Engineering, 221

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 R. Sattari, D. Hu, X. Liu, H.W. van Zeijl, S. Vollebregt, Kouchi Zhang