Mentor Blogs

Electronics cooling simulation was born out of the world of CFD, rather fully conjugate heat transfer simulation where convective, radiative and conductive affects are considered concurrently. Back in the day much talk was had about turbulence modelling, convective discretisation schemes and linear equation solvers, all typical CFD subjects but somewhat out of place in the context of what became the … Read More

CTM, Electronics Cooling, CFD, T3ster

FloTHERM, and its sister product FloVENT, have been going since 1989. Many in the Mechanical Analysis Division in Mentor have been working on these products for that time, personally I’m up to 15 years. It’s testament to the products and their success that our passion for them continues unabated. V9.2 was released this week, the ~20th release in these product lines. Many vendors will stand … Read More

CTM, Electronics Cooling, bottleneck, FloVENT

I believe in simulation and its effectiveness. I’ve seen how much money it can save. I’m also not the most patient person on the face of the planet. Therefore, I like simulation because it can give fast answers to rather big questions. But sometimes you need more.  Sometimes you also need to measure the real world. This is especially true in the world of semiconductors. You see heat dissipation in … Read More

Thermal, T3ster, CTM, JEDEC, characteristics, package, Semiconductor, measurement hardware, NXP Semiconductors

Next stop on the avenue of package thermal modelling is 2 resistor CTMs (compact thermal models). Specifically Theta_jb and Theta_jc, the thermal resistance between junction and board and junction and case respectively. Unlike their lowly 1R cousins these two resistances do not purport to include the effects of the package environment (well almost not) as such they should in theory be more BCI (boundary … Read More

BCI, CTM, 2R, Thermal Resistor, Electronics Cooling

Lumped block package representation makes the best use of limited available data to simulate for an ‘indication’ of case temperature. Some indication is better than none but I wouldn’t bet on it, really, I wouldn’t. Accurate case and junction temperature prediction can only be realised with either a fully 3D detailed representation or an abstracted CTM (compact thermal model) representation. Here we’ll … Read More

Thermal Resistor, CTM, Electronics Cooling, Component, SPICE, Thermal Resistance, IBIS