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Thermal characterization at all levels of electronics design is a must. Ideally one already starts already at chip level. Unfortunately this is not yet a common practice in IC design flows, but starting from packaged semiconductors as components, tools supporting temperature aware design are available, like FloTHERM.PCB - to study thermal properties of a given PCB design, or FloTHERM with which one can find out how a complete electronics enclosuere full with PCB each populated with semiconductors would behave in its thermal environment. Of course simulations are as reliable as input data used. (That's the positive aproach, I simply did not want to mention the GIGO principle: garbage in, garbage out.) So, real life thermal characterization of semiconductor devices - such as ICs, discrete diodes, transitors or special devices like power LEDs or really high power ones like IGBTs - is always a must. Standard thermal metrics like RthJA or RthJC (junction-to-ambient thermal resistance, junction-to-case thermal resistance) are widely used on product data sheets. One simply hopes, that this is not just a data cheat: These metrics allow comparison of competitive products - at least one sincerly belives that a smaller thermal resistance value reported on a data sheet also means better thermal performance. To find out these metrics or to validate vendors' data requires thermal testing of semiconductors. Transient thermal testing is a new paradigm: measuring the dynamic response of a semiconductor package to single shot power shot (a step-wise switching of the heating at the semiconductor chip) carries all available information about the heat conduction path from the chip's active surface towards the thermal environment of the packge. This means, that different sections of this path can be identified, such as the die attach region, details of the package, the TIM (thermal interface material) or even the cooling effciency of a given heat-sink can also be judged. Measuring the real world with thermal transient testing thus helps validate simulation models, allows to provide accurate and reliable data for product data sheets, allows fialure analysis, identify materials thermal properties like thermal conductivity of TIMs, etc. This blog aims at providing information about different developments in the thermal testing: new and un-common applications of thermal transient testing, status on measurement standards, ideas on test based generation of simulation models and alike.

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