The thermal advantages of directly paralleling regulators are shown here. In this example, two LT3080 3mm × 3mm DFN devices are mounted on a 1oz copper 4-layer PC board. The parts were placed approximately 1.5 inches apart while the board was mounted vertically for convection cooling. Two tests were set to measure the cooling performance and current sharing of these devices. The first test was done with approximately 0.7V input-to-output and 1A per device output which produced a 700mW dissipation in each device. The temperature rise above ambient is approximately 28°C. The thermograph in this figure shows the temperature distribution between these devices. The PC board reached ambient temperature within about a half an inch from the devices.