Grow confidence in thermal management with thermal simulations before production

As miniaturization continues driving electrical design complexity, engineers face physical performance design issues with thermal management. These compact designs often perform at higher temperatures and require additional cooling. Increasing time-to-market pressures require reliable, confident designs well before production - when correcting designs is expensive and time-critical.

Reliability prediction relates failure rates of electronic assemblies to the temperature change over an operational cycle and the rate of temperature change. Since component temperature is closely related to predicted reliability, accurate prediction of component temperatures helps thermal designers achieve reliability, performance, and operational success goals.

How thermal simulations can impact your electronics thermal design

Thermal simulations created early in the electronics thermal design process enable companies to address component reliability as early as possible in product development. Using a digital twin from the early ideation phase allows design performance assessment and increases digital twin fidelity throughout development up to verification of the final design.

By shifting the performance assessment earlier in the design process, teams can design products for performance and reliability versus available engineering resources. Learn more about predicting component temperatures in this whitepaper.

Component temperature predictions across electronics thermal design

Engineers can assess component temperature predictions throughout electronics thermal design as new iterations of products become available. Reliable, accurate component temperature prediction allows designers to understand how close the design values come to the maximum allowable temperature. Engineering teams gain increased confidence in the final simulation results with consistently updated design information.

How to increase confidence in thermal simulations results

Accurate component temperature is essential for designers to increase confidence in thermal simulations. To accurately predict a component's temperature, the component should be modeled explicitly as a part of the thermal simulation. Not all components need to be modeled, and designers can consider small components with low power density that are not particularly thermally sensitive as thermally benign. Large components like electrolytic capacitors may disrupt airflow, requiring designers to represent them as 3D objects.

How electronics thermal design software can help with your application

Electronics thermal designs software opens the door to creating digital twins and accurate component temperature simulations. Simcenter provides accurate multi-discipline and multi-physics simulation software tools alongside robust test solutions to support the creation of a virtual digital twin from early-stage ideation, with increasing fidelity throughout development to final verified design.