An approach to deal with packaging in power electronics

Current packaging technology in power electronics is based on assembling pre-manufactured discrete components. Each component consists of a number of parts, manufactured in a variety of manufacturing processes. This has resulted in a diversity of construction parts and mutually incompatible manufacturing processes in a typical power electronic converter and has brought power electronics to the edge where it becomes extremely difficult to reduce the cost and size of power electronic converters. This also makes integration of power electronic converters difficult. In this paper, we present a way to improve the physical construction of power electronic converters by increasing level of integration and using multifunctional construction parts. integration and packaging are two important aspects of physical construction of power electronic converters. Both of them and their mutual relationship are discussed in the paper. Three quantities intended to evaluate integration level and volumetric utilization namely functional elements integration level, K/sub I/; packaging elements integration level K/sub P/; and volumetric packaging efficiency /spl eta//sub v/ are introduced. Based on these values, a number of techniques to increase the integration level are presented. A design process in the form of a flowchart intended to implement these techniques in concrete design cases is presented.