Thermal Characterization Analysis of IGBT Power Module Integrated with a Vapour Chamber and Pin-Fin Heat Sink

Inhalt:
Due to continuously rising power dissipation densities at the die level, insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) power modules are heated up further by themselves and suffer several sever thermal reliability problems such as module deformation, performance degradation and even permanent damage. If the heat could not be efficiently removed or obviously non-uniform temperature distribution could not be eliminated by thermal management system, the failure rate would rise quickly. Under this condition, there is a great need for innovative and efficient cooling technologies. In this paper, a combined vapour chamber (VC) and pin-fin heat sink cooling strategy for IGBT power module is proposed. Vapour chamber as a super heat spreader is used for dissipating heat from chips to pin-fin heat sink effectively and improving the temperature uniformity of the pack. The Direct Copper Bond (DCB) layer is directly soldered on top of vapour chamber and pin-fin heat sink is attached on bottom of vapour chamber. In order to evaluate the reliability of the IGBT power module integrated with a vapour chamber and pin-fin heat sink, the analysis of thermal performance were conducted by modelling, taking account of real environmental and operational conditions. The simulation result shows the integrated thermal management system surpasses traditional cooling solutions on cooling capacity due to merits of vapour chamber and novel structure design. The junction temperature and temperature difference reduces to 93.4 °C and 1.7 °C respectively at heat transfer coefficient of 900 W/m2K.