Power Electronic Packaging presents an in-depth overview of power electronic packaging design, assembly,reliability and modeling. Since there is a drastic difference between IC fabrication and power electronic packaging, the book systematically introduces typical power electronic packaging design, assembly, reliability and failure analysis and material selection so readers can clearly understand each task's unique characteristics. Power electronic packaging is one of the fastest growing segments in the power electronic industry, due to the rapid growth of power integrated circuit (IC) fabrication, especially for applications like portable, consumer, home, computing and automotive electronics. This book also covers how advances in both semiconductor content and power advanced package design have helped cause advances in power device capability in recent years. The author extrapolates the most recent trends in the book's areas of focus to highlight where further improvement in materials and techniques can drive continued advancements, particularly in thermal management, usability, efficiency, reliability and overall cost of power semiconductor solutions.

The last twenty years have seen major advances in the electronics industry. Perhaps the most significant aspect of these advances has been the significant role that electronic equipment plays in almost all product markets. Even though electronic equipment is used in a broad base of applications, many future applications have yet to be conceived. This versatility of electron ics has been brought about primarily by the significant advances that have been made in integrated circuit technology. The electronic product user is rarely aware of the integrated circuits within the equipment. However, the user is often very aware of the size, weight, mod ularity, maintainability, aesthetics, and human interface features of the product. In fact, these are aspects of the products that often are instrumental in deter mining its success or failure in the marketplace. Optimizing these and other product features is the primary role of Electronic Equipment Packaging Technology. As the electronics industry continues to pro vide products that operate faster than their predecessors in a smaller space with a reduced cost per function, the role of electronic packaging technology will assume an even greater role in the development of cost-effective products.

With today's high density, high performance electronic systems, packaging and more specifically thermal engineering has become the critical factor that limits on-time product introduction and reliability in the field. This book serves as a reference for engineers who must predict the thermal performance of a company's latest product as well as the technicians who must quickly solve the problem of an overheating chip in a product that is already on the shelves.

In the earlier stages of integrated circuit design, analog circuits consisted simply of type 741 operational amplifiers, and digital circuits of 7400-type gates. Today's designers must choose from a much larger and rapidly increasing variety of special integrated circuits marketed by a dynamic and creative industry. Only by a proper selection from this wide range can an economical and competitive solution be found to a given problem. For each individual case the designer must decide which parts of a circuit are best implemented by analog circuitry, which by conventional digital circuitry and which sections could be microprocessor controlled. In order to facilitate this decision for the designer who is not familiar with all these subjects, we have arranged the book so as to group the different circuits according to their field of application. Each chapter is thus written to stand on its own, with a minimum of cross-references. To enable the reader to proceed quickly from an idea to a working circuit, we discuss, for a large variety of problems, typical solutions, the applicability of which has been proved by thorough experimental investigation. Our thanks are here due to Prof. Dr. D. Seitzer for the provision of excellent laboratory facilities. The subject is extensive and the material presented has had to be limited. For this reason, we have omitted elementary circuit design, so that the book addresses the advanced student who has some back ground in electronics, and the practising engineer and scientist.