Utility of transient testing to characterize thermal interface materials

This paper analyzes a transient method for the characterization of low-resistance thermal interfaces of microelectronic packages. The transient method can yield additional information about the package not available with traditional static methods at the cost of greater numerical complexity, hardware requirements, and sensitivity to noise. While the method is established for package-level thermal analysis of mounted and assembled parts, its ability to measure the relatively minor thermal impedance of thin thermal interface material (TIM) layers has not yet been fully studied. We combine the transient thermal test with displacement measurements of the bond line thickness to fully characterize the interface.