5 Future Study

There are a couple of areas that can be addressed in a future study. The first is to investigate these or similar layouts’ effect on ultra small (less than 1 mm²) packages like the DSBGA and X2SON that traditionally have poor thermal performance. Due to poor heat dissipative capability inherent to small packages, the PCB layout can have a reduced effect on the thermal performance compared to the WSON, TO-252, and SOT-23 packages. Another more complex extension of this study can develop an equation or Figure of Merit (FOM) that incorporates connected copper area, disconnected copper area, the location of these areas relative to the board stack up, number of thermal vias, and so forth. This FOM, which would correlate to an equivalent thermal impedance of the board, can be applied to provide a more targeted value for the expected θ_JA of a given layout.