JAJSER6C February 2018 – March 2023 LMZM23600
PRODUCTION DATA
Thermal design is an important aspect of any power regulator design. Every supply dissipates some power, and providing sufficient copper area for proper heat dissipation is important. The package thermal resistance curves vs PCB copper area along with the power dissipation curves in Section 7.7 can be used to estimate the necessary copper area for the design. Consider Equation 7 and Figure 9-48.
As an example, consider a typical application of 24-V input 5-V output with 0.5 A of output current and estimate the required heat-sinking area. For this example consider a maximum ambient temperature TA_MAX of 95°C and no air flow or additional heat sinking besides the PCB layers. Calculate the maximum allowed package thermal resistance for this design specification.
From Section 7.7, it can be seen that the power dissipation for 24-V input, 5-V output, and 0.5A load is 0.4 W. Based on Equation 7, for this power dissipation level and 95°C maximum ambient temperature, the maximum package thermal resistance must be less than 75°C/W. To achieve this thermal resistance with a 2-layer board, the approximate area of the board copper must be at least 5 cm2.