Proceedings of InterPACk'99, Vol. 1, pp. 979-986, June 1999

Integrated Thermal Analysis of an Automotive Electronic System

S. Murthy, Y. Joshi, V. Adams and K. Ramakrishna,
CALCE Electronic Products and Systems Consortium
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Abstract:

Reliability and performance analyses in the design process necessitate the need for accurate prediction of electronic device junction temperatures and the overall system temperature field. Due to the large computational time and storage space involved in such simulations, the grid sizes in these are usually not fine enough to capture all details at the board and the component level. The concept of integrated thermal analysis of electronic systems is relatively recent. It achieves high resolution calculations of the temperature field for the board level simulation by extracting thermal information from a global model and interpolating on a finer grid.

The present study looks into the application of integrated modeling in the thermal characterization of a generic automotive electronic system. The system contains a 272 terminal plastic ball grid array (PBGA) and two power devices housed in an aluminum module. This methodology achieves zooming from system level to component level with just adequate detail at each level. Commercially available softwares were used for implementing the methodology. Nearly 40% savings in computational time was observed for the example case considered, while achieving good agreement with the predictions from a detailed model.

Complete article is available to CALCE Consortium Members

 



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