Development of component-level thermal models of a ceramic pin grid array

A methodology is presented for development of compact thermal models for a family of electronic packages, ceramic pin grid arrays (CPGA), in a form compatible with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. A compact model of a CPGA was created and its performance investigated in numerical wind tunnel tests. The results were compared with a detailed CFD model of the package previously validated with experimental results available in the literature. The CFD compact model was able to predict the junction temperatures within 5% of those calculated by the detailed model for flow velocities ranging from 0 to 5 m/s (0 to 1000 ft/min) and three different heat sink configurations. The effects of coarsening the grid were also investigated and the results show that the compact model predicts the junction temperature accurately, whereas the detailed model increasingly loses accuracy as the grid is coarsened.