1 Introduction

Thermal performance of power regulators often improves with increased copper area connected to its pins. The connection can be made in the component layer and inner layers. The metric which describes the increased PCB thermal performance with larger copper area is the R_ΘJA. (see Section 5).

This application note serves as a resource to illustrate how increased PCB copper area (lower R_ΘJA ) results in a lower temperature rise of a power regulator. The LM5013 is used as example, but, these principles can be applied to most power regulators.