Dissipating-Heat-Blog-Banner

Do your PCBs have an issue with dissipating heat? Then Eurocircuits has a solution for you. Our IMS pool offers a cost-effective solution using ‘Insulated Metal Surface’ that dissipates heat efficiently away from the source.

Some components may need passive or active cooling to function correctly. For example, voltage regulators, high-current LEDs, MOSFETS, and powerful computing devices such as microcontrollers and FPGAs. These may consume large amounts of power which increases their internal temperature, and the temperature around them. Components that operate in temperatures higher than they were designed for are more likely to fail or have reliability issues and their operational lifespan may be significantly reduced.

Heat sinks on top of components and large copper surfaces under them are sometimes suitable solutions, but may not be able to dissipate enough heat. In these cases our Insulated Metal Surface (IMS) technology may be a good solution.

In IMS PCBs the metal carrier’s function is to dissipate heat and is usually made of aluminium or copper. The metal carrier is insulated from the copper conductor pattern by a thermally conductive dielectric layer. The heat generated is then dissipated through this layer to the metal carrier from where it is then dissipated into the surrounding air, directly or via a heatsink.

First Choice for Dissipating Heat from Leds or Voltage Regulators

After evaluating our customers’ need for better heat dissipation techniques we concluded that the best way to serve that need is to create an IMS pool. A single sided PCB, about 1.6mm thick, on aluminium substrates. The base material is the Polytherm TC-Lam 2.0 with thermal conductivity of 2.0 W/mK and thermal resistance of 0.50 K/W. An aluminium (alloy 5052) layer of about 1.5mm responsible for the heat dissipation, and a 35 micron copper foil on the opposite side of an electrical insulator of ~100micron forms the base for the circuit. The specifications for the IMS pool are available here, and the material specifications are available on our Download page.

Dissipating-Heat-1Dissipating-Heat-2

Instant online pricing is available for our IMS pool through our PCB Calculator. As with all our services, it includes DRC and DFM checks for both the PCB and assembly providing a complete ‘virtual manufacturing’ before ordering.

“How do we make IMS boards”, is explained on Eurocircuits TV video below.


A customer application of using our IMS pool service can be seen here.

All IMS pool specifications can be found here.

IMS PCBs

Eurocircuits offers a pooling service for IMS PCBs with aluminium cores for optimum heat dissipation of LEDs

About Eurocircuits

When you need a reliable and affordable single-source European electronics manufacturing partner, with over 30 years of experience, then Eurocircuits is an excellent choice.

By working with us you get many pooling options, instant pricing, free DRC and DFM tools, multilingual support, and much more.

Eurocircuits offers fast and reliable on-time services without compromising on quality, using a broad range of technologies to bring you a cost-effective manufacturing service.

We help you achieve Right First Time for Manufacture through virtual manufacturing so that  you can get your projects to the market on-time and on budget. Let’s make your project a reality!

More about Eurocircuits …

Be the first to read all about our news and information. Follow us on