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September 2016 • The PCB Design Magazine 57 uses a lot of computational resources. Finally, copper tracks and areas modeled can be analyzed in a 3D thermal simulation soft- ware for the greatest amount of detail (Figure 5). "Wide" copper tracks and areas are represent- ed individually as parts of the input data. This method has the most accurate results because each layer has a 3D representation. A detailed 3D model provides an explicit representation of the geometry and materials, and is most accurate. A detailed PCB model should be used when the main cooling path is through the board, and a simpler PCB represen- tation when the board is not the main cooling path. All these models can be used for transient simulations of the PCB. All aspects of the simulation model should have the same magnitude of details. A model is THE FUNDAMENTALS OF IMPROVING PCB THERMAL DESIGN Figure 2: Lumped approximation model. Figure 4: Model of each layer with patches. Figure 3: Individual layers' model. Figure 5: Copper tracks and areas modeled in 3D detail.