Simplified Heat Simulation of PCB Circuitry - An evaluation of electrothermal simulation in SPICE

Abstract

Abstract The project aimed to develop a procedure of simplified heat simulation of printed circuit boards (PCB). The procedure made use of electrothermal analogies to perform heat analysis in spice (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) software. The procedure included curve fitting algorithms to generate thermally analogous networks of electrical components from thermal impedance graphs provided in semiconductor datasheets as well as programs to convert the parameters into spice compatible format. The project succeeded in developing the procedure but the resulting generated simulation model required manual intervention to fall within 10% deviation from an existing model. The issues are related to the conversion between the foster and cauer topologies.