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lectronics companies at the leading edge of per- turn, this greater accuracy can help improve time to market,
formance are being forced to address board-level and reduce engineering and manufacturing costs.
thermal requirements at the earliest stages of
design. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) constitute Increasing Importance of Board Design
the primary area where mechanical engineers In the fairly recent past, board-level thermal simulation
can influence the thermal design at the conceptual design was not considered to be a critical part of the mechanical
phase. So, the ability to accurately predict the thermal design flow. Power-dissipation levels were low, and as long
performance of the PCB early in the development process as temperature and airflow guidelines were met, thermal
is becoming more critical than ever before. issues were usually relatively easy to resolve.
A key limitation of tools designed to simulate the per- In this scenario, the task of the mechanical engineer was
formance of PCBs early in the design process has been simple: ensure that the chassis housed each PCB within
their inability to take into account the effects on thermal sufficient airflow at the right temperature. Thermal man-
conductivity of localized concentrations of copper. But a agement was usually addressed at the time the chassis was
recent improvement in these design tools gives designers designed, normally by adding fans and cooling vents.
the ability to model the effects of copper concentration on The thermal design was typically based on a system-level
thermal conductivity in board-level thermal simulations. simulation. The chassis designed by this method normally
The latest generation of PCB design tools makes it pos- had a relatively long shelf life, typically three to five years.
sible to model copper concentration at whatever level of de- Once the thermal solution was fixed, it was expected to
tail is desired, even to the point of modeling each individual last through several generations of boards. The mechanical
trace. This approach has been demonstrated to substantially
improve the accuracy of upfront PCB thermal simulation. In
Fig. 1. With the smeared copper approach to thermal modeling, the Fig. 2. Simulation of board temperatures with the smeared
simulation tool calculates an average value for thermal conductivity copper approach yields a microprocessor junction temperature
in a local area such as that surrounding the microprocessor. of 55.4°C above ambient.
Higher Resolution
The fact that junction temperature continually fell as the
accuracy of the model increased can be explained by the fact
that increasing the resolution of the model provided a more
Fig. 6. A temperature profile based on the detailed model in Fig. 5 concentrated and efficient heat-conduction path. Accuracy
indicates the lowest processor junction temperature of all the naturally increases as the size of the patches is reduced.
simulations — 45°C above ambient. In this application, the primary heat-conduction path
is between the lead and lands, and there is a 0.6-mm gap
The array more realistically depicts the location of the between the lead and lands. As the size of the patches ap-
copper traces and so more accurately models the flow of heat proaches 0.6 mm, the accuracy of the results can be expected
away from the processor as shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The array to improve substantially. PETech