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THERMAL ANALYSIS OF HIGH POWER LED ARRAYS

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Several COB arrays are shown in Figure 94. All products employ a 1 mm2 LEDchip.
The pitch is less than 2 mm in all products, which may cause a severe increase in
the junction temperature. In case of Cree XLamp MC-E, although LED-chips are placed
so closely, there is a path of heat spreading and the thermal resistance of the package is
not large. On the contrary, in case of BridgeLux BXRA-C2000 and PerkinElmer Elcoss
COB array, the thermal resistance of the package could be very large due to the small
pitch. If the operating power is low, less than 1W, the increase in the junction
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temperature will not be significant. However, if these devices operate at high power, the
pitch should increase.
The thermal management of UV LEDs was studied. The LED-chip is a flip chip
structure and is mounted on a AlN DBC substrate. A picture of an actual device and the
schematic of its structure are shown in Figure 95. This design was from the Army
Research Labs and provided by Dr. Meredith L. Reed.
Several different designs of the p-mesa interconnectors are considered as shown
in Figure 96, and the junction temperature with respect to the design is studied by FEA.
Several assumptions are made for this simulation. Firstly, we assume that all power
applied turns into heat. The UV LED operates at 80 mA and 7 V0.56 W is used as
heat generation. Secondly, we assume that heat generation occurs inside the GaN device
just upper side of p-mesa interconnections. The other assumptions are the same with
those shown in chapter 3. The AlN DBC substrate, which has 203 m of Cu and 635 m
of AlN, and the heat sink design shown in Figure 29 was used. The material properties
are shown in Table 10. The results of simulations with 5 different p-mesa interconnector
designs are shown in Figure 97. The lowest junction temperature is 43.7C in the 1-pixel
device and the highest one is 45.5C in the 6-pixel device. The difference is 1.8C and
the thermal resistance difference becomes 3.21C/W. The difference mainly comes from
the heat generation area. Since the area of power generation is the largest in the 1-pixel
device, the junction temperature is the lowest, while since the area is the smallest in 6pixel device, the junction temperature is the highest.
Another study on the selection of the substrate and the thickness of the copper
layer was conducted. From the previous study, the thickness of the copper layer and its
area size are not important factors in determining the thermal resistance in the substrate.
However, since the heat flux area is 1 mm by 0.3 mm in the case of the 1-pixel device,
which is smaller than a typical device, there could be some difference. Therefore, several
FEA simulations were conducted and compared with analytical solution Figure 98. For
this study, we used the 1-pixel device. Firstly, the thermal resistance as a function of
copper thickness was calculated by an analytical method with 0.3 mm2 of heat flux area.
The thermal resistance of the same structure was estimated by FEA with two different
heat flux areas; a 1 mm by 0.3 mm rectangle and 0.3 mm2 square. The analytical solution

agrees exactly with the FEA result with square heat source; however the FEA result with
rectangular heat source is slightly lower than the analytical one. The difference of
thermal resistance between the substrates of 70 m and 350 m of copper is 1.31C/W
with the square heat source and 1.15C/W with the rectangular heat source. The
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differences are only 0.74C and 0.65C with 0.56 W power input. A simulation of the
entire package shows the difference in the junction temperature is 0.025C, which is
much smaller than that of the analytical solution (see Figure 99). This is because
generated heat can spread in the GaN device and Al2O3 submount and flow through the
n-electrode. As mentioned previously, thick copper is not suitable for flip chip structure
because of its low etching resolution. Therefore, a thin copper layer is much better for
the AlN DBC substrate of UV LED.