As digital electronic devices continue to shrink and put greater functionality within consumer and enterprise products, thermal management continues to grow as the bottle neck for defining next generation architectures. Significant challenges exist today because the heat being generated continues to rise while the thermal envelope remains constant for silicon devices.
While some switching power converters have moved to III-V semiconductor materials such as GaN, the overall system still contains many silicon semiconductor devices that must meet traditional thermal envelopes. The removal of this heat has become a critical aspect of the design process, often being a very significant driver of what can be delivered within an electronic product.
With electronic product design continuing to push manufacturing constraints the reliability of a product must be evaluated during design to prevent potentially massive recalls, which in some cases can cost a company billions of dollars. This can be the difference between a company surviving or declaring bankruptcy. Evaluating product reliability during the design stage requires engineering tools and predictive analyses to evolve, thereby meeting the demands of product development.
This one-hour webinar will provide an update on ANSYS’ latest improvements to the ANSYS Icepak product, which is used for electronics thermal engineering design. It will focus on recent enhancements from FinFet chip thermal design all the way through the board, assembly and system thermal designs.
Over the last couple of years ANSYS has focused on delivering an easy to use thermal solution for electronic packaging and printed circuit boards. This solution will be discussed in depth, highlighting electro-thermal analyses along with a tie into thermal-mechanical stress and reliability predictions.
Another area that has been enhanced, providing significant ease-of-use improvements, is the import of Mechanical CAD. ANSYS SpaceClaim can now be used to import, cleanup, defeature, and simplify Mechanical CAD for its use in Icepak simulations. SpaceClaim’s coupling with Icepak provides a convenient method to quickly integrate Mechanical CAD geometry into Icepak and accurately perform thermal simulations, helping to drive both product architecture decisions and also go-to-market product decisions.
Usage of high performance compute clusters reduces time to market dramatically. Improvements at ANSYS 18 in Icepak’s high performance computing (HPC) capabilities leverage users’ access to high performance computing. The ability to use customer-internal or external clouds, such as Nimbix and Amazon AWS, with Icepak provides powerful capabilities in electronics cooling simulation by leveraging large scale distributed computing power.
Finally, as we continue to see significant demand in the area of electro-thermal design, we will preview the next generation of electronic thermal design software from within the ANSYS Electronic Desktop. This next generation, CAD-centric design methodology significantly reduces the traditional barriers between Mechanical and Electrical engineers, promoting an easy to use framework and design methodology to meet electronics thermal design challenges today and into the foreseeable future.
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