PCB design flow under thermal control

Component power density is increasing rapidly today and requires more sophisticated cooling equipment, which must be rationalised in order to prevent degraded component performances or poor reliability. One challenge of component package/board design is to identify strong thermal constraints and propose pre-optimisation early in the upstream phase. To increase the productivity and the reliability of the design task, companies need to develop a common methodology and approach for their design teams. This one requires a redefinition of the roles and involves a close partnership between the various actors of board design, such as Librarian, Electronics Engineer, Electronics Designer and Thermal Expert. The expected benefits of "using an a shared thermal "brick" model methodology is that designer and expert activities are linked from preliminary design to final thermal simulation. This allows us, considering a predictive accuracy of 15%, to eliminate bad component candidates and to identify the weakest ones at an early stage, while accelerating the design cycle by quick EDA iterations and so reducing design cost.