Electronic – Power dissipation versus power consumption

For a device you will often see a figured called \$\theta_{JA}\$. This is called thermal resistance.

This tells you that in a typical ambient environment for every watt dissipated, the device will heat up x°C above ambient. You must include ambient temperature into your calculation. In an open lab environment, it might be 25°C but in reality inside the casing of some electronics it can be much hotter.

If you add a heatsink you need to know \$\theta_{JC}\$ (junction-case resistance), \$\theta_{CI}\$ (case-insulator resistance, if any), \$\theta_{IH}\$ (insulation-heatsink resistance, if any), and finally \$\theta_{HA}\$ (heatsink-ambient resistance.) Like normal electrical resistance you can add these together to get a final figure for how much your device will heat up when it dissipates x watts.

Yup, that's the way MOSFET datasheets work. The maximum current rating really means "This is the maximum current you can ever possibly get thru this thing, if you were to somehow not violate other specs in the process, although we have no idea how to do that. We put this here because we think it's cool, and maybe someone is dumb enough to buy a truckload of them before realizing they can't actually run the part at this value for any set of real world conditions".

Basically, each of the limits of the device are specified separately. You have to look at what you're doing and carefully check each one. The real limit on current is usually die temperature. To check that, look at the max Rdson for your gate drive level, compute the dissipation due to your current, multiply that by the die to ambient thermal resistance, add that to your ambient temperature, and compare the result to the maximum die operating temperature. When you figure all this backwards to find the maximum current the device can take before overheating, you'll usually find that's well below the absolute maximum current spec.