Thermoelectric Cooling for Bare Dies Power Devices Embedded in PCB Substrates

Abstract:
Efficient thermal solutions are becoming a challenging issue in integrated power boards based on PCB substrate in which bare dies can be embedded. The purpose of this paper is to study and compare different solutions based on thermal vias, thick PCB copper layers and thermoelectric coolers (TECs). For TEC, multiphysics 3D simulations using Finite Element Method (FEM) are performed to define their optimum parameters leading to the maximum coefficient of performance (COP). Experiments have been performed to validate the 3D thermal models. These experiments are based on a test-bench providing thermal heat flux measurement in order to compare thermal performances of the different cooling solutions.