Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/916068
38 The PCB Design Magazine • December 2017 by Patty Goldman I-CONNECT007 IPC's fall committee meetings were held in conjunction with SMTA International, as has been the case for several years now. I sat in on some subcommittee meetings, including one on laminates, where I met up with Ventec COO Mark Goodwin for a discussion on thermal man- agement from a laminate supplier's perspective. Patty Goldman: Good to see you, Mark. How about we talk about thermal management? Mark Goodwin: Yes, let's. From our perspective, there are really two material sets that we con- sider for thermal management. There's the IMS (insulated metal substrate) materials, the met- al-back materials, which started off as an LED lighting story. But it's much, much more than an LED lighting story now, particularly with the development in e-vehicles and hybrid vehicles. There's a lot of e-powertrain, so heavy current moving power around in cars. The second strand is a new direction for us and the technology is a thermally conductive thin core material, thermally conductive pre- preg for building multilayers with thermal con- ductivity or using those layers and those pre- pregs in standard multilayer constructions, but as a hybrid, so only putting the thermal man- agement where you need to put it. Goldman: So, is it sort of self-cooling, then? Goodwin: The materials have a thermal capac- ity. They can take heat away from embedded components. For example, people using coin technology (embedding a metal inside the PCB under the high-power components so that heat can be dissipated) may not need to use that, or maybe they can use it in conjunction with thermally conductive prepregs, thermally con- ductive cores. As a company, we're publishing an eBook through I-Connect007 on thermal management and the materials for thermal management. It's predominantly an IMS story, but there is some discussion in there about the new materials, thin cores and prepregs, and our thinking about thermal management. So that's thermal resistance and thermal impedance compared with thermal conductivity. There's FEATURE