A study of the thermal characterization of a high Performance flip chip package

This paper describes a systematic experimental and numerical study of the thermal characterization of a flip-chip package. A cold-plate based test method is used for thermal characterization and internal thermal resistance is used as the basis of all comparisons. Experiment results are presented for three flip-chip packages. Test parameters such as thermocouple wire, attachment, thickness of interface material (grease) between the package lid and the cold plate and power dissipation are presented. Using a detailed numerical model [1], of the package, a parametric study of the experimental method is presented. The parametric study shows the variation in package thermal resistance due to different thermocouple bead sizes, thermocouple attachment parameters, different thermal grease thicknesses and different chip-lid thermal interface material (TIM) properties. All the numerically predicted values are within the experimental range.