New standard for PCB current carrying capacity

28 October 2009 News

The IPC has announced the release of IPC-2152 – ‘Standard for Determining Current Carrying Capacity in Printed Board Design’. The 97-page document sets an industry standard for determining the appropriate sizes of internal and external conductors as a function of the current-carrying capacity required and the acceptable conductor temperature rise.

Replacing the conductor sizing charts that currently exist in IPC-2221 (which were based on data sets more than 50 years old), the new IPC-2152 standard provides guidance on how thermal conductivity, vias, power dissipation, printed board material and thickness, and most importantly, the presence of copper planes all factor into the relationship between current, conductor size and temperature.

“It has been a long time coming,” says Michael Jouppi, chairman of the IPC 1-10b Current-Carrying Capacity Task Group that has worked on developing the standard since 1998. “The temperature rise of a printed board conductor is a complex problem that required a significant amount of testing as well as the development of computer simulations to improve the understanding of how certain variables impact the temperature rise of a conductor. But the need was to provide general design guidelines that were simple and accurate. So we have divided IPC-2152 into two sections.”

The main document establishes general, conservative guidelines for sizing conductors and contains simple charts that show testing results for both internal and external conductors in air and vacuum environments. The document’s appendix provides more specifics, giving clarity and insight into how variables impact the temperature rise of a conductor and presenting detailed charts based on copper weights.

For more information visit www.ipc.org

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