Wm. Godfrey et al., INTERACTIVE THERMAL MODELING OF ELECTRONIC-CIRCUIT BOARDS, IEEE transactions on components, hybrids, and manufacturing technology, 16(8), 1993, pp. 978-985
The numerical modeling of printed circuit board (PCB) configurations i
s becoming more prevalent as denser electronic packages are manufactur
ed. Determining an optimal PCB design typically requires modeling and
testing several different chip conifigurations. At present, much of th
e time and cost spent modeling these various configuration is repetiti
ve in nature, with the same chip or board being regenerated several ti
mes before obtaining the most efficient design. By using a decoupled,
iterative, numerical technique, a more systematic and efficient method
for determining PCB temperature distributions has been developed and
incorporated into a controlling algorithm which utilizes any standard
finite element code. Steady-state temperature distributions are obtain
ed for each decoupled chip/board component by iterating upon decoupled
interface boundary conditions until convergence is obtained. The main
advantages of this decoupling technique are the elimination of repeti
tive numerical-model generation and the high level of interactive desi
gn provided.