Research on direct plated copper heat spreader and its thermal performances for high power LED packaging

In this paper, a kind of heat spreader called direct plated copper ceramic spreader (DPC) is introduced. Different from the conventional ceramic spreaders, DPC manufacturing process includes thin film technology which increases the ability to make more accurate patterns and enables integrations in a larger scale. As a feature of the technology, electroplating was adopted to grow metal circuit layer, which was carried out in room temperature and applied in high temperature. During the research, manufacturing process of DPC was described in detail and thermal performances were measured with a transient thermal tester T3Ster. As an application in high power LED package, DPC was used as heat spreader to measure the thermal performance. Thermal differences between the conventional MCPCB heat spreaders and ceramic ones have been comparatively studied. At the same time, DPC samples with different ceramic and copper layer thicknesses were packaged and measured under the same condition. The results showed that DPC spreader was better than the conventional MCPCB spreader and the ceramic thickness played an important role to affect the thermal resistance of the packaged LED devices.