Cooling with Mentor Graphics HyperLynx Thermal

The electronics designing process exceeded the simple level of developing projects based on empirical approaches, when for every single change tremendous cost in time and money was spent in most of the cases. Moving the design process from the real to the virtual world changed the engineering perspective on what can be done in less time. As previous discussed [9], [12], signal integrity and power integrity analysis become more and more recommended for the current electronic designs developed around the world. Combining the high frequency and high component density on most of current electronic designs, the generated temperature becomes a very important result of power consumption. This kind of issue can be controlled using certain approaches. Metal mounting holes with their screw, radiators, fans and some other thermal transfer solutions might be instated. The designer experience can be used to control the board temperature but the significant amount of time and money on checking solutions is tremendously reduced by using HyperLynx Thermal, the thermal analysis solution provided by the Mentor Graphics Company. The paper focuses on this thermal analysis solution capabilities for controlling temperature techniques on virtual prototypes of printed circuit boards by running what if scenarios.