Heat Pipe Integrated in Direct Bonded Copper (DBC) Technology for the Cooling of Power Electronics Packaging

As the power densities of power components continue to grow, thermal issues are becoming extremely important and vital for the product quality. The primary causes of failures in electronic equipment are the excessive temperatures of the critical components, such as semiconductors and transformers. Power systems for space application are usually housed in completely sealed enclosures due to safety reasons. Since the cooling of these systems primarily relies on natural convection, the effective management of the heat removal from a sealed enclosure poses a major thermal-design challenge. In this context heat pipes are very effective heat transfer devices and can be used to raise the thermal conductive path in order to spread a concentrated heat source over a much larger surface area. As a result, the high heat flux at the heat source can be reduced to a much smaller and manageable level that can be dissipated through conventional cooling methods. The objective of this work, presented in this paper is to describe the feasibility of a cooling system with miniature heat pipes embedded in a direct bonded copper structure (DBC). The advantage of this kind of heat pipe is the integration of the electronic component layout directly on the heat pipe itself, which eliminates the existence of a thermal interface between the device and the cooling system