Interactive thermal modeling of electronic circuit boards

The numerical modeling of printed circuit board (PCB) configurations is addressed. Determining an optimal PCB design typically requires modeling and testing several different chip configurations. At present, much of the time and cost spent modeling these various configuration is repetitive in nature, with the same chip or board being regenerated several times 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 obtained 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 repetitive numerical-model generation and the high level of interactive design provided