Leadframe designs for plastic overmold packages

The specification describes a plastic overmolded package for high power devices that has a very low lead count, typically fewer than eight, and in a preferred embodiment, only two. The leads occupy essentially the same linear space as the multiple leads in a conventional package and thus have a wide-blade configuration. To improve mechanical integrity, the leads in the package are provided with retention slots to add back the equivalent of the plastic joints in the spaces that were eliminated due to the wide-blade design. The retention slots extend in the width dimension of the leads.