Thermal analysis and design of plastic packages for GaAs RF IC power amplifiers

Recent experience in designing and analyzing a GaAs RF plastic IC package with numerical simulation is reported in this paper. Due to its relatively higher power consumption and significantly lower thermal conductivity (than silicon), thermal performance has always been an important issue to GaAs plastic IC packages. Addressing the thermal issue with the conventional design prototyping, and testing process is often too time-consuming to respond to market demands. Through a thorough correlation study, the authors have developed a quick and reliable way of performing the thermal analysis and design for plastic GaAs IC packages by numerical simulation (design by physics based simulation). Benchmarking of the temperature prediction was established by performing a combination of chip and package level heat transfer analyses and conducting a series of temperature measurements of actual packages.