Excerpt: 'The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to... Thermal Management with Insulated Metal Substrates, Vol. 2'

Reading time ( words)

Introduction
The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to... Thermal Management with Insulated Metal Substrates, Volume 2, by Didier Mauve and Robert Art of Ventec International Group is the second in a two-part series. This book builds on the material presented in the first by describing up-to-the-minute products and design techniques for thermal management with IMS.

The first volume comprehensively covers principles of heat transfer and modeling of thermal systems to help engineers quantify the thermal-management challenges in the application at hand, the nature of IMS, typical material parameters, and the choices available for designers to reach the desired performance.

We recommend reading the first book in order to understand the issue from first principles, how to navigate the many material choices offered, and appreciate how adjusting the various combinations of material types and thicknesses can help you arrive at a solution that meets your requirements from all standpoints, particularly system reliability, size, cost, and manufacturability.

The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to... Thermal Management with Insulated Metal Substrates, Volume 2, covers additional use cases and materials, including those used for high-temperature applications as well as high-emissivity surface treatment that can significantly enhance thermal performance. A web-based thermal calculator is demonstrated, which helps arrive at the exact size of baseplate needed to achieve the desired thermal performance in the smallest possible volume—much smaller than would be possible using a suitably sized heatsink.

Volume 2 delves deeper into issues such as test methods and how these can affect assessments of IMS materials and analyzes the effects of tolerances in material properties and thickness on the overall thermal conductivity. Understanding this can critically influence measurement error, ultimately determining whether or not an accurate result for reliability can be calculated. The authors look at how problems such as solder cracks affect thermal performance, and share application examples showing design with multilayer IMS.

As application challenges have evolved, and new component types and thermal materials have entered the market, there is more to say about thermal management and the options available to designers striving for an effective, economical, and compact solution to meet system-reliability targets.

To continue reading this book from the I-007eBooks library, download it today!

 

05/25/2023 | Mike Morando, PFC

While the layout of the circuit gives us much of the electrical characteristics of the design, your choice of materials can affect the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the circuit. Material choices affect not only the design of the circuit for its environment, but also the manufacturing and assembly processes. While the layout of the circuit gives us much of the electrical characteristics of the design, your choice of materials can affect the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the circuit.

05/25/2023 | I-Connect007 Editorial Team

Columnist Kelly Dack has had a pretty wide range of experiences. As a PCB designer, he has sat behind the desk at an NPI company, an OEM, a fabricator, and now an EMS provider. We asked him to share a few thoughts on the materials selection process and how it could be improved.

05/08/2023 | I-Connect007 Editorial Team

As you’ll see in this month’s issue of Design007 Magazine, slash sheets such as IPC-4101/126 were never meant to be used by designers when comparing PCB laminates. These documents were created to facilitate communication between purchasing and customer service departments. You could say that slash sheets are made for administrative purposes, not engineering.