Modeling of stacked packaging thermal performance in module/system environment

Package thermal performance is determined by package design and its environment in a system. In reality, it is often costly, and sometimes impossible to include all the detailed features of a package into its system thermal management simulation. This is particularly true for stacked packages due to the design complexity. This paper proposes a methodology to realistically model stacked packages by simplifying the detailed package using a compact model with correlated equivalent thermal performance through a design of experiment (DOE) approach. The correlation between the compact model and package detailed model showed a less than 6.5% error under various boundary conditions, and thus becomes a powerful tool for further evaluation and optimization of the package thermal design.