Ceramic Additive Manufacturing Potential for Power Electronics Packaging

Compared with silicon-based power devices, wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor devices operate at significantly higher power densities required in applications, such as electric vehicles and more electric airplanes. This necessitates the development of power electronics packages with enhanced thermal characteristics that fulfill the electrical insulation requirements. The present research investigates the feasibility of using ceramic additive manufacturing (AM), also known as three-dimensional (3-D) printing, to address thermal and electrical requirements in packaging gallium nitride (GaN)-based high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). The goal is to exploit design freedom and manufacturing flexibility provided by ceramic AM to fabricate power device packages with a lower junction-to-ambient thermal resistance (R-theta JA ). Ceramic AM also enables incorporation of intricate 3-D features into the package structure in order to control the isolation distance between the package source and drain contact pads. Moreover, AM allows to fabricate different parts of the packaging assembly as a single structure to avoid high thermal resistance interfaces. For example, the ceramic package and the ceramic heatsink can be printed as a single part without any bonding layer. Thermal simulations under different thermal loading and cooling conditions show the improvement of thermal performance of the package fabricated by ceramic AM. If assisted by an efficient cooling strategy, the proposed package has the potential to reduce R(theta JA )by up to 48%. The results of the preliminary efforts to fabricate the ceramic package by AM are presented, and the challenges that have to be overcome for further development of this manufacturing method are recognized and discussed.