Thermal simulation of high-lead count packages

An efficient thermal management in electronic components is essential to minimize the influence of thermomechanically induced stress and thermal load. To reduce the effort caused by measuring the thermal behavior of semiconductor components frequently thermal simulation is applied. However, using commercially available software packages high effort is necessary for maintenance and for generating the thermal models. In addition the limitation of the node number does not allow spatial discretization sufficiently fine for high lead count packages. In this paper a new thermal simulation tool is presented which allows to establish models in a very efficient way. The developed and implemented solver based on the alternating direction implicit method (ADI-method) is efficiently processing the required high node number. Moreover, in this paper the developed thermal simulation tool is applied for the thermal characterization of a 176 lead QFP-Package using a discretization with 320.000 nodes. Steady-state and transient thermal qualities of the package are investigated.