Managing heat generation and dissipation in today’s compact and complex electronic world requires the attention of designers and manufacturers alike. It is also a system-wide problem, because optimizing a thermal problem in one area—whether it’s package, board or enclosure—rarely ensures the entire system will be optimized.
Past techniques to determine heat-related problem spots in electronic systems have relied on a physical, instrumented prototype of the design. But the alternative to this time consuming and expensive effort is software modeling. Inexpensive, high-performance desktop and server farms have enabled the development of more accurate and sophisticated thermal modeling systems similar to the ones used by mechanical engineers.
