Assessment of Thermal Behavior and Development of Thermal Design Guidelines for Integrated Power Electronics Modules

TLDR: In this article, the authors presented an in-depth understanding on the thermal behavior of the embedded power modules and summarized a few thermal design guidelines for the Embedded Power modules, including thermal modeling and thermal testing.

Abstract: With the increase dependency on electricity to provide correct form of electricity for lightning, machines, and home and office appliances, the need for the introduction of high reliability power electronics in converting the raw form of electricity into efficient electricity for these applications is uprising. One of the most common failures in power electronics is temperature related failure such as overheating. To address the issue of overheating, thermal management becomes an important mission in the design of the power electronics to ensure the functional power electronics. Different approaches are taken by academia and industry researchers to provide efficient power electronics. In particular, the Center for Power Electronics System (CPES) at Virginia Tech and four other universities presented the IPEM approach by introducing integrated power electronics modules (IPEM) as standardized units that will enable greater integration within power electronics systems and their end-use application. The IPEM approach increases the integration in the components that make up a power electronics system through novel a packaging technique known as Embedded Power technology. While the thermal behavior of commonly used packages such as pin grid arrays (PGA), ball grid array (BGA), or quad flat pack (QFP) are well-studied, the influence of the Embedded Power packaging architecture on the overall thermal performance of the IPEMs is not well known. This motivates the presentation of this dissertation in developing an in-depth understanding on the thermal behavior of the Embedded Power modules. In addition, this dissertation outlines some general guidelines for the thermal modeling and thermal testing for the Embedded Power modules. Finally, this dissertation summarizes a few thermal design guidelines for the Embedded Power modules. Hence,