Power Supply

Electronic Design Presents Thermal Design for Modern DC/DC Converters

Sept. 13, 2022

TI's Dorian Brillet de Cande provides tips and details for dc/dc converter designers.

This is an Engineering Academy Preview video.

Electrical engineers encounter many challenges when designing power supplies. This includes thermal performance of the system.

Modern dc/dc converters are expected to handle higher ambient temperatures in smaller footprints to optimize cost and solution size in automotive, personal electronics, and industrial equipment. This session will enable engineers to understand the thermal demands of high-power-density designs for their next-generation products.

We will examine how to read and interpret datasheet thermal metrics such as Θ JA and Ψ JT for TI’s Flipped Die on Lead Frame (HotRod) packages, and how to gather necessary information from efficiency and typical thermal performance curves. We also will highlight how to do effective thermal layouts and showcase studies of the tradeoffs for routing, layer count, and thermal vias on thermal performance.

This video is the initial part of the Thermal Design for Modern DC/DC Converters in Power Systems Design on Engineering Academy. You can watch the full presentation there, as well as others in this learning session. You also can check out additional sessions such as those covering RISC-V and AI on the Edge.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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