Predict and manage Thermal Reliability in your electronics application

Electricity generates heat. When you design a electronic application, you need to make sure that your design is safe. Thermal Reliability should therefore be an important part in your design process. But how can you simulate this and prevent heat from causing issues?

When designing your product, you want to be sure to have it designed, tested and produced time and cost efficiently. Using simulations on various parts of your design helps you to achieve your goals. Testing the thermal reliability of your electronic device will reduce and/or minimize possible catastrophic failures, operational robustness issues and product life uncertainty.

Heat transfer

When electricity travels through your application it produces heat. If this is not managed properly within your device, various problems can occur. Electromigration and mechanical failures are prominent issues due to increased temperatures but also material properties can change due to heat which could lead to cascading effects on your design.  

Optimizing your cooling strategies and understanding the thermal impact is therefore extremely important during your product design process to create best-in-class electronic systems.

Thermal simulations

Thermal simulations allow engineers to evaluate and optimize cooling strategies, allowing them to quickly realize ‘what if’ scenarios. For example: is forced convection approach using fans a better approach then natural convections with shielding? And what happens if I place my heatsink in a specific spot?

Ansys tools enable you to evaluate the thermal performance from the chip/die level all the way up to the system and data center level. You can also visualize downstream effects such as thermal-mechanical effects, PCB and package warpage and stress.

Ansys Icepak

Ansys Icepak is the tool to use to check the thermal reliability of your design. It is an integrated electronics cooling solution for IC packages, PCB’s as well as complete electronic systems. It includes the option to simulate your fluid flow, conjugate the heat transfer, make steady state and transient analysis and more. The tool offers ease of use as well as two-way coupling with Multiphysics softwares for an even more detailed analysis of your design.

Thermal Reliability

Different parts of your design, ask for different solutions in terms of Thermal Reliability. Packages for example, need to be accurately characterized so their thermal performance can be estimated by OEM’s in unique design configurations. Therefore Ansys Icepak provides high fidelity package modelling capabilities to create detailed and compact thermal models of IC packages. It links with Ansys SIwave and Ansys Mechanical to enable you to update your design in a two-way coupling.

If you are working with PCB’s, you are at the core of Electronics Reliability. Modern PCB designs are increasingly complex and detailed. Ansys Icepak provides high fidelity PCB modelling capabilities to enable you to perform thermal simulations for single and rack mounted boards. It offers accurate modelling of resistive of heating traces.

The complete electronics systems needs to be operating as intended. All the separate components can be working as expected, but together in a system the outcome can be different. Since the electronics systems are becoming more complex every day, the importance of a reliable design becomes more urgent as well. With Ansys IcePak you can import MCAD and ECAD formats and integrate components such as packages, PCB’s, subsystems et cetera into your complete electronic system.