Model reduction techniques for speeding up the thermal simulation of printed circuit boards

Abstract

This paper initiates a measuring method to reduce the traditional three-dimensional thermal circuit models into the two-dimensional compact ones. The new thermal models are represented by the equivalent circuits which can be simulated in the SPICE. Furthermore, the ambient temperature and the power of the components are also decoupled to equivalent voltage and current sources, respectively. Therefore, when the ambient temperature or the power of the component changes, the compact thermal models can still work without doing any regeneration work. The proposed technique can greatly reduce the simulation time of heat transfer of printed circuit boards. Furthermore, the reduced models can be connected to any place on the model of the printed circuit board. The proposed technique provides a systematic synthetic way to build up models of printed circuit boards.