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This paper presents a very straightforward method to compute the transient thermal response to arbitrary power dissipation profiles in electronic devices with multiple heat sources. Using cubic spline interpolation of simulated or measured unit power step response curves (Zthfunctions), additional errors due to model reduction can be avoided. No effort has to be spent on the generation of compact models. The simple analytic form of the interpolating splines can be exploited to evaluate the convolution integral of the Zth-functions with arbitrary power profiles at low computational costs. An implementation of the algorithm in a spreadsheet program (EXCEL) is demonstrated. The results are in very good agreement with temperature profiles computed by transient Finite Element simulation but can be obtained in a fraction of the time.

Traditionally the thermal behavior of power devices is characterized by temperature measurements at the junction and at accessible external points. In large modules composed of thin chips and materials of high thermal conductivity the shape and distribution of the heat trajectories are influenced by the external boundary represented by the cooling mount. This causes mediocre repeatability of the characteristic RthJC junction to case thermal resistance even in measurements at the same laboratory and causes very poor reproducibility among sites using dissimilar instrumentation. The Transient Dual Interface Methodology (TDIM) is based on the comparison of measured structure functions. With this method high repeatability can be achieved although introducing severe changes into the measurement environment is the essence of this test scheme. There is a systematic difference between thermal data measured with TDIM method and that measured with temperature probes, but we found that this difference was smaller than the scatter of the latter method. For checking production stability, we propose the use of a structure function-based Rth@Cth thermal metric, which is the thermal resistance value reached at the thermal capacitance belonging to the mass of the package base. This metric condenses the consistency of internal structural elements into a single number.