Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1285883
60 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020 power, even in moderate ambient conditions. That means that the thermal design has to consider how the user experience is going to be impacted, when, rather than if, the equip- ment gets too hot. With thermal performance now tied to the performance the end-user sees, thermal design is receiving more focus. In part, it is these types of considerations that led us to develop Simcenter Flotherm XT as a sister product to Simcenter Flotherm, which includes a Parasolid-based solid modeler to help users work more easily with native CAD geometry. We have also invested effort in soft- ware features that support active thermal man- agement, such as clock frequency control, to reduce power. As design margins have shrunk, thermal designers require increasing fidelity in late design, which has led to a focus on modeling components in more detail, and using test-based characterization to calibrate simulation models to give 99+% accuracy on the temperature in both space and time. Boards today can be mod- eled taking into account the local copper cover- age, which strongly influences how heat passes from the components into the board. Shaughnessy: Tell us about Simcenter Flo- therm. How does this tool help engineers address thermal challenges? Parry: Simcenter Flotherm was developed as a tool specifically to help designers solve ther- mal problems in electronics. What we realized many years ago was that the electrical engineers were designing components and PCBs in isola- tion from the system that the board would be used in, so the environment for the board was unknown. Mechanical engineers responsible for the overall integrity of the product, includ- ing thermal performance and reliability, would subsequently have to take whatever action nec- essary to cool the board. That means building a thermal model of the entire system which they can use to try out different ways to keep the board temperature and the temperature of key components down to acceptable levels. To help users build models quickly, we devel- oped Smartparts, which are intelligent model- ing objects of common cooling components like fans, heatsinks, etc. which make building models in conceptual design fast and robust. Over the years, a lot of sophistication has been added, particularly in the way in which these Smartparts represent boards and components. Shaughnessy: You'll get a chuckle out of this. Happy Holden recently told us that when Mentor first acquired the FloTHERM tool, he couldn't believe that he was able to do 3D fluid dynamics on a Dell computer, and not a Cray. Parry: Yes, it is impressive, isn't it? When we started, Flomerics recognized that most of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) world was moving in the direction of body-fitted meshes, where the mesh used for the simu- lation is distorted around the objects in the model. While this has advantages for model- 1U server showing effect of internal fans on heatsinks and DIMMs. Automotive sensor fusion box with liquid-to-air heat exchanger.