Thermal Analysis of Components and Traces on Printed Circuit Boards

High currents flowing through various traces of a printed circuit boards (PCB) causes thermal run away and PCB warpage due to the occurrence of high heat density. The present study discusses on a steady state thermal analysis performed on PCB. Thermal analysis allows PCB designer to quickly move and confirm the component’s placement by understanding the temperature plots of the PCB surface. A PCB particularly designed for automated manual transmission (AMT) application employed in Ashok Leyland trucks is used for this study. The board level simulations are performed with commercially available software Altair PollEx 2022.2. PollEx is a PCB level EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software suite used for design, analysis and manufacturing and thus helps in minimizing the development cycles. The simulations are performed for the worst case scenario and also for various application functions needs to be performed by the board. These simulations are time efficient as these are performed at a board level, and are easy to analyze at the early design stages. The maximum power dissipation for each and every component and the component analysis power level plays a significant role in deciding the temperature at various components in the PCB. The temperature at various components on the board are predicted and compared with the measurements conducted with the help of a thermal imager. A good agreement is observed between both the predicted and measured values.