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Thermal Analysis of Light Emitting Diode

Integrated Light Source Based on a
Fourier Series Solution
Jie Yu, Jianing Lu, Yuzhen Tong, and Guoyi Zhang

Abstract It is difficult to measure the junction temperature

of every chip in the light emitting diode (LED) integrated light
source by using common experimental methods. In this paper,
a model to simulate the whole temperature field in sources face
of LED integrated light is proposed. Fourier-based solution is
used to solve the heat equation in three dimensions. The thermal
model is programmed by M ATLAB and has been validated by
finite element method simulations. The comparison shows that
the relative error between these two models is within 3.6%.
Index Terms Flotherm Fourier series, light emitting diode
(LED), thermal model.

I. I NTRODUCTION

N RECENT years years, light-emitting diodes (LEDs)

have been used in many applications, such as general
indoor and outdoor lighting due to their good reliability, long
lifetime, tunable color, low power consumption and absence of
mercury [1]. Therefore, since LED lights are a good solution
for energy shortage, more and more countries have spent lots
of financial and human resources on these devices. According
to the estimation of authorities, the widespread use of LEDs
can largely reduce current lighting energy consumption, which
would relieve the energy crisis in the world to some extent [2].
However, compared with conventional light sources the
application of an LED still suffers from low luminous intensity because only about 20% of the input power can be
transformed into light. High power LED array packaging has
been suggested as a solution for this problem, but since the
remaining 80% of the power is transformed into heat, the
junction temperature of these devices is prohibitive. Thus, the
thermal problem has been a bottleneck for high power LED
array, and it affects stability, reliability, and lifetime of the
whole device. In other words the temperature of LEDs is one
of the most important parameters during the design of multiple
LED packaging.
Manuscript received May 14, 2012; revised November 25, 2012; accepted
November 29, 2012. Date of publication March 7, 2013; date of current
version March 28, 2013. This work was supported by the National Key
Basic R&D Project 973 of China under Grant 2011CB013101. Recommended
for publication by Associate Editor X. Luo upon evaluation of reviewers
comments.
The authors are with the School of Physics and State Key Laboratory of Artificial Microstructure and Mesoscopic Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China (e-mail: yjlc5@126.com; pkuljn@gmail.com;
yztong16@pku.edu.cn; gyzhang@pku.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCPMT.2012.2235128

A single-chip package is defined as a connection of a

bare chip to a single plastic, ceramic, or other type carrier.
Therefore, the multichip should be defined as providing the
same functions with more than one bare chip on a single carrier
or more than one prepackaged chips on a single substrate [3].
Usually, an LED integrated light source, which possesses two
or more bare chips directly on a single carrier, could belong to
category of multichip. There are many experimental methods
to study LED chip temperature, including thermocouple measurement, forward-voltage method and electro luminescence.
But they are generally used to measure the junction temperature of a single LED chip. In LED multichip packaging modules, the junction temperature is determined by considering
thermal coupling effect of a single LED chip. A new thermal
analysis method is necessary predict the temperature field and
distribution in LED integrated light source.
Thermal analysis methods were classified into two general
approaches: numerical and analytical. Numerical methods can
be applied to arbitrary geometries, but they describe the
temperature profile with straight lines [4]. To obtain acceptable accuracy, it is necessary to use dense discretized mesh,
which is computationally inefficient and needs professional
knowledge of modeling and simulations. On the other hand,
analytical approaches involve the search for an exact analytical
solution in structures with regular geometries. Fortunately, the
LED packaging, LED sources and substrate are commonly
simplified to rectangular structures. Rectangular single-layer
[5], [6], two-layer [7], [8], three-layer [9], [10], and four-layer
structures [11][13] with surface heat sources on integrated
circuit device have been studied. In 2010, Cheng et al. [14]
first put forward a single-layer analytical solution to analyze
the multiple LED packaging in its own right. Moreover, they
proposed a method of combining the analytical solution of
rectangular plate and thermal resistance to deal with the
multilayer problem [15]. Ha et al. [16] gave the same method
but with a circular analytical solution to compute the resistance
of a LED array. Luo et al. [17] also found a method, which
takes the mutual thermal effect of each chip into consideration,
to estimate the temperature of high-power LED.
Despite the excellent pioneering work made by former
researchers, it is still a novel approach to employ analytical
four-layer model, with thermal convection in the upper and
lower surface, to study the temperature field of LED sources
surface and temperature of every LED chip mounted on the
Si sheet.

2156-3950/$31.00 2013 IEEE

YU et al.: THERMAL ANALYSIS OF LED INTEGRATED LIGHT SOURCE

Fig. 1.

613

Integrated light source.

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of boundary conditions about the four-layer model.

Fig. 2.

Thermal model for simulation.

II. H EAT C ONDUCTION IN LED I NTEGRATED

L IGHT S OURCE
The structure of an LED integrated light source is illustrated
in Fig. 1, which consists of nine LED chips mounted on the
package bonded on the Al heat sink. To obtain an analytical
solution for the temperature, the structure is simplified so that
the package size is the same as the Al substrate board, as
shown in Fig. 2.
As shown in Fig. 1, the GaN LED chip produces heat and
heat conducts through the packaging layers which includes
substrate, slug, solder and Si layer. Clearly, this is a multilayer
heat conduction problem. The heat equation is partial differential equation which describes the variation of temperature in
a given region. In the 3-D heat conduction equation, thermal
conductivity k i for the i th layer is assumed to be isotropic
and independent with temperature, and constant heat flux Q is
required to be generated from the top surface
2 i
2 i
2 i
k
+ ki
+ ki
= 0.
2
2
x
y
z 2
i

(1)

To find the temperature distribution, the heat transfer equation given by (1) is solved analytically, where i (x, y, z) is
the temperature in the i th layer. The boundary conditions are
as follows, illustrated in Fig 3.
1) The boundary conditions of on the two large surfaces
are the homogeneous boundary conditions
1
= h 1 ( 1 A ),
z
At z = 0 and (x, y)
/ source area
4

= h 4 ( 4 A ) At z = d4 .
k4
z
k1

(2a)
(2b)

Fig. 4.

Schematic diagram of the calculation chips distribution on slug.

2) All the lateral surfaces are adiabatic

i
= 0, x = 0, L
x
i
= 0, y = 0, W.
y

(3a)
(3b)

3) The heat flux over the heat source i distributed uniformly

over the source area
1
= Q, z = 0 and (x, y) source area. (4)
z
4) The temperature is continuous at interfaces between
layers
i = i+1 , z = di , di = 1, 2, 3.
(5)
k1

5) The heat flux is continuous at interfaces between

layers, implying that no heat is generated at the
interfaces
ki

i
i+1
= k i+1
, z = di , i = 1, 2, 3.
z
z

(6)

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TABLE I
M ATERIAL P ROPERTIES AND T HICKNESS OF E ACH C OMPONENT IN LED S
Component
Material
Thermal conductivity
(W/m k)
Thickness (mm)

Si Sheet
Si

Solder
AuSn

Slug
Cu/Dia

Heat Sink
Al

124

59

650

180

0.25

0.15

1.5

(a)

(b)
Fig. 6. Simulation results comparison between two models. (a) Temperature
distribution in Flotherm. (b) Temperature distribution in MATLAB.

Fig. 5. Temperature distribution of the 10 W LED integrated light source

package simulated by Flotherm.

Using the method of separation of variables, the double

Fourier cosine series solution can be computed to temperature
distribution of a single source [7]




 m y 

l x
.
(x, y, z) =
l m lm (z) cos
cos
L
W
l=0 m=0
(7)
For integers l and M

1/2, l = 0

l =

1,
l = 0

1/2,

m = 1,

m=0
m = 0.

For a structure with multiple sources, the solution can be

obtained by the superposition of the corresponding single
source solution
s

i Q i + A
(8)
=
i=1

where A is the surrounding ambient temperature Q i is the

heat dissipation at the i th source, and i is the Fourier solution
for the i th source of unit dissipation.
III. S IMULATION R ESULTS
The Fourier solution is programmed by MATLAB and
validated by the software Flotherm. Combining advanced
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques to predict
temperature and heat transfer, Flotherm [18] is powerful

3-D software for thermal design of electronic components and

systems. So it is a feasible tool for checking the thermal model.
As shown in Figs. 1 and 4, 10W LEDs are composed of
nine GaN-based chips arranged on a Si sheet which is soldered
on copper/diamond composite slug. The slug is located in
the center of the heat sink, with very high conductivity of
650 W/mK. The LED integrated light source is soldered on
an Al heat sink which transfers the heat to the ambient air. The
dimension of each chip is 1 1 0.1 mm and the distance
between two chips is 1.5 mm along x and y direction. The
material properties of each component are shown in Table I.
The Flotherm was used to analyze the thermal behaviors
of the 10W LED integrated light source under 10 C ambient
temperature. 3-D mesh models were applied to heat sink with
225 471 grids. The highest temperature is 49.25 C, which is
found in the chip located in the center of slug. The temperature
distribution under this model is shown in Fig. 5.
1) Temperature distribution in Flotherm.
2) Temperature distribution in MATLAB.
To employ a Fourier double cosine series solution into the
present model, the thickness of the sources is neglected and a
heat sink with many fins should be simplified into a plate in
the heat transfer area. According to the numerical data, and
based on Q = FT , the average heat transfer coefficient of
natural convection below the heat sink is obtained as follows
[14]:

0.64 W
Q
W 2
2
=
=
1.38
=
m k
m k
A T
0.14 33
F

where Q is the heat dissipation, A F is the total heat transfer

area of the substrate and fins and T is the temperature
difference between fins and the environment. In the abovementioned numerical simulation,T is about 33 C. Then the
general convection coefficient is 1.38 W/m2 k. In accordance
with the geometrical data provided by Fig. 1, the equivalent

YU et al.: THERMAL ANALYSIS OF LED INTEGRATED LIGHT SOURCE

615

TABLE II
T EMPERATURE OF E ACH C HIP IN THE T WO M ODELS

FLOTHERM
MATLAB

LED1
48.94
49.51

LED2
48.97
50.08

LED3
48.94
49.50

LED4
49.19
50.03

LED5
49.25
50.73

LED6
49.19
50.03

LED7
49.04
49.51

LED8
49.08
50.08

LED9
49.04
49.50

Fig. 7. Temperature simulation result of each chip in MATLAB and Flotherm.

Fig. 9.

Comparison of chips temperature before and after optimization.

TABLE III
P OSITIONS OF A LL C HIPS
Coordinates of the Chips in x and y Direction(m)
Before optimization
0.0385
0.0400
0.0415
After optimization
0.0370
0.0400
0.0430

Fig. 8.

Temperature field after optimization.

convection coefficient h eff in the model is based on equation

A F = h eff Ab . Where A F is the total heat sink area
exposed to the environment. Ab is the heat sink base area.
Depending on fins base area, coefficient h eff in the analytical
model is 29.10 W/m2 k. Meanwhile, we set the natural
convection coefficient as 5 W/m2 k at the top surface.
A MATLAB program is built to compute the temperature distribution of top surface, shown in Fig. 6, and the temperature
of each chips. The data comparisons between the analytical
solution and Flotherm simulation are presented in Figs. 57,
and Table II. The maximum temperature difference is about
1.5 C and the maximum relative error is about 3.6% within
the permission range. Thus, the Fourier series solution model
is effective and accurate.

paper, we realize this goal by changing the spatial distribution

of chips.
From the view of symmetry optimization in one direction
is sufficient to decrease the temperature difference. First, the
optimized chip distance in x coordinate was chosen and a
loop was used in the program in which the distance of the
chips changed with an increment of 0.1 mm. Then the same
methods were applied to the chip distance in y direction. After
the optimization, the highest temperature decreased to 48.5 C
and the maximum temperature difference among chips changes
from 1.2 C to 0.3 C. At the same time, the temperature
difference in the package decreased from 5.5 C to 3.5 C.
Therefore, temperature uniformity was notably improved and
compared with previous simulation results, as shown in Fig. 8.
The temperature and coordinate locations of chips before
and after optimization are presented in Fig. 9 and Table III,
respectively.
From Fig. 8, the temperature distribution of the LED
integrated light source was obtained by the analytical solution
model with smooth curves in a very low resolution, which is
difficult for both experimental and numerical methods.

IV. O PTIMIZING THE T EMPERATURE D ISTRIBUTION

Significant gradient could produce thermo-mechanical stress
in the LED package, which is very harmful to LED reliability.
From Fig. 5, there is a temperature difference, about 5.5 C,
in the package. Therefore it is necessary to reduce the thermal
expansion mismatch and junction temperature of chips. In this

V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a Fourier series solution for the heat equation
of the four-layer model was used to analyze the temperature
distribution of LED integrated light source with upper and
lower surface cooling. The analytical model was programmed

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by MATLAB and the results obtained were validated by the

3-D simulation FEM software Flotherm. The comparison
proved that the analytical solution is effective. To ameliorate
the thermo-stress in the package, the optimization based
on the Fourier series solution was performed. The results
implied that the model can easily and expediently provide
the optimized chips distribution. In addition, the Fourier
series solution can present the temperature distribution in very
low resolution.
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Jie Yu received the B.S. degree in material formation and control engineering from the Guangdong
University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, in
2010. He is currently pursuing the M.S. degree in
condensed physics with Peking University, Beijing,
China.
He has been with the State Key Laboratory of
Artificial Microstructure and Mesoscopic Physics,
Peking University, since 2010. He holds a China
patent on a LED freeform lens design. His current
research interests include optical design and thermal
analysis of high power light-emitting diode (LED), including modeling,
analysis and design of LED integrated light sources about optical and thermal
respect.

Jianing Lu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in

condensed physics from Peking University, Beijing,
China, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in nanoscience with
the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
He is currently a researcher in nanoscience with
the Nanoscience Laboratory, School of Chemistry
and Bio21 Institute, University of Melbourne. He
was with the Laboratory Research Center for Wideband Gap Semiconductors from 2007 to 2012. He
developed the new optical method to design circular
illuminance free-form lens. He has discovered an optimizational method
to ameliorate circular illuminance of extended LED sources. He holds one
Chinese patent on flashlights. He has published two articles.

Yuzhen Tong received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in

solid state physics from Peking Normal University,
Beijing, China, in 1989 and 1992, respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree with Peking University, Beijing.
He is currently an Associate Professor with the
School of Physics, Peking University. His area of
expertise is semiconductor optoelectronics. His past
research interests have included MOCVD techniques
and GaN-based materials and devices. He has published over 60 papers on nitride materials and
devices. His current research interests include GaNbased LEDs optical and thermal design.

Guoyi Zhang received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.

degrees in physics from Jilin University, Changchun,
China, in 1975, 1982, and 1990, respectively.
He joined Peking University, Beijing, China, as
a Post-Doctoral position in 1990. He is currently
a Professor with the School of Physics and the
Director of the Research Center for Wide-band
Gap Semiconductors, Peking University. His area of
expertise is semiconductor optoelectronics. His past
research interests have included MOCVD techniques
and GaN-based materials and devices. He has published over 300 papers on nitride materials and devices. His current research
interests include GaN-based short-wavelength laser diodes, LEDs, DMS and
spintronics, UV detectors, and electronics.