Electronics
Mentor’s thermal design solutions reduce overall design time, reduce late-design rework, reduce time-to-market, increase reliability, and reduce the final cost of electronics products.
Chip packaging to data center cooling
Since the early 90s, we have led industry research and development in electronic thermal design, through development of physical models of fans, heat sinks, chip packages and many more components that influence thermal design. A strong proponent of open standards, we have supported standardization through our involvement in the JEDEC thermal subcommittee for two decades.
Our electronics thermal design and airflow simulation software solves most design problems associated with cooling for electronics, including IC package and heatsink design, thermal design of printed circuit boards, and selecting the correct cooling fans.
A recent survey by Aberdeen Research found that our customers achieve thermal design verification 3 times faster than others, and are 5 times less likely to need design "re-spins."
The Changing Role of CFD in Electronics Thermal Design
Technology OverviewThe presentation will discuss how the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology in the thermal design of electronics systems has changed since its earliest use in electronics design in the late... View Video
Related Products
- FloTHERMFloTHERM is a powerful 3D computational fluid dynamics software that predicts airflow and heat transfer in and around electronic equipment, including the coupled effects of conduction, convection and radiation.
- FloEFDTightly integrated with major MCAD systems including Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, and CATIA, FloEFD is fully-featured 3D fluid flow and heat transfer analysis software without the numerical complexity and meshing overhead of traditional CFD.
- FloVENTFloVENT is a powerful Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software that predicts 3D airflow, heat transfer, contamination distribution and comfort indices in and around buildings of all types and sizes.
- T3SterT3Ster® is an advanced thermal testing tool for thermal characterization of semiconductor chip packages. Its high precision hardware and advanced software provides the best thermal testing solution available worldwide.
- TERALEDTERALED® is aimed at the combined thermal and radiometric/photometric characterization of high power LEDs.
Application Examples
Electronic Enclosure
Flow streamlines and surface plot showing temperature distribution
Smaller is better – at least that seems to be the adage of choice as far as electronics are concerned. From mobile phones to computers and MP3 players, electronics cooling has become a major issue for manufacturers. As products become more feature laden, more components are placed in smaller enclosures leaving less room for cooling airflow. Therefore, manufactures have turned to FloEFD to help them identify and solve electronics cooling problems.
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Velocity flow streamlines
Recently a design engineer needed to improve the efficiency of this electronics enclosure. He used FloEFD to calculate the temperature distribution and visualize the airflow. Preparing the model for analysis was very easy with FloEFD. Unlike traditional CFD programs that require users to create additional solid parts to represent the fluid (empty) regions, FloEFD automatically differentiates between the two for internal and external flows and automatically represents the fluid domain. As a result, engineers are freed from the tedium of creating unnecessary geometry just to prepare a solid model for analysis.
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Cold Plate
Fluid temperature in section through cold plate - water in tube, air outside
Cold plates refer to a type of heat exchanger. They rely on liquids as the source of their cooling mechanism. They can be used in medical equipment, power generation and electronics among many others.
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Fluid temperature in section through cold plate – legend range reduced to enhance water temperature
This engineer was concerned with optimizing a new heat exchanger. FloEFD was used to calculate the component temperatures and heat flux on the surface of the tube.
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Surface temperature on exterior of heat plate
FloEFD was especially helpful because engineers can conduct what-if tests on the number of loops or change the fluid quickly and easily without remeshing or reapplying boundary conditions.
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Learn more about how Mentor Graphics' Mechanical Analysis solutions.
Datasheets
Toolbox
- TECHPUB: Solving the System-Level Thermal Management Challenges of LEDs
- TECHPUB: The effect of fan swirl to PSU cooling
- TECHPUB: Extraction of a Two-Resistor/Two-Capacitor Thermal Model
- TECHPUB: Thermal Analysis of a UHP High Current Driver
- TECHPUB: Thermal Comparison of a Microprocessor using Phase Change Materials
- Product Demo: CAD-Integrated CFD for use in electronics cooling
- Product Demo: FloEFD.V5 Demo
Contact Mentor Graphics
- Request Information or call toll free: 1-800-547-3000
Success Stories
Océ
The printer manufacturer chose FloEFD flow simulation software due to its strong support, seamless integration, and exceptional performance. View
“We use FloTHERM as our CFD analysis tool because FloTHERM is well-structured and easy to use compared to other CFD tools, and Flomerics provides the best technical support. The support team is very knowledgeable and responses are always well coordinated.”
Shailesh Joshi, Thermal Analyst, Hewlett-Packard