Heatsinks aren’t a novel energy efficient type of washing bowl, they are parts that are placed on high powered IC packages to help remove the heat more effectively and thus lower the operating temperature of the package which in turn increases reliability, can improve performance etc.  etc. Such approaches are observed in nature, from Elephants ears to the low sun … [Read more...]

Are you concerned with the thermal design of electronics systems? Are you a thermal, mechanical or electrical engineer wrestling with product design issues? Or are you an engineering manager or director concerned with improving your team’s overall design flow? Then Mentor’s new Electronics Cooling community is for you. No electronics cooling or thermal design topic … [Read more...]

The ability of FloTHERM to resolve a massive disparity in geometric length scale in a single model is for me its greatest strength. By not having to make simplifying assumptions to ignore either extremely small or truncate extremely large geometric parts and features, simulation accuracy can be better assured. The ‘die in a city’ model in the previous blog resolved … [Read more...]

Electronics are small and getting smaller. The world in which we live is tending to stay at the same size. The one thing that typifies electronic thermal simulation models is the disparity of length scale that has to be accommodated. FloTHERM has been evolved to handle this disparity for over 20 years.  I, my fellow FloTHERM apostles and hopefully the FloTHERM userbase … [Read more...]

This series, despite being somewhat lengthy, is by no means a complete overview of the various methods, options and approaches to predicting component temperatures. Here is some stuff I didn’t cover… My bias in this series is towards the prediction of component temperature via simulation using a 3D CFD approach adopted in our (as ever) market leading FloTHERM and … [Read more...]