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Thermo-Electric Circuit Board Simulation with

TRM3.7

Components and currents heat the PCB (assembly) - but how hot will it get? Are the temperature limits complied with? No data sheet or guideline will tell you.

With TRM (Thermal Risk Management) you are able to calculate the thermal performance of your circuit board before the laboratory test

… and with new TRM 3.7 it's even easier to generate a better temperature forecast. Made easier than with add-ons of the big EDA vendors.

• Import your Gerber, placement, drill files or netlist or set the necessary    data manually (see FAQ)

• 3D circuit board model with up to 50 layers

• Update: Easy export and import for ALTIUM users

• NEW:       Easy export and import for EAGLE users

• Clearly arranged operation

• Templates and file formats for parameter input

• Can also be used without CAD data - for technologists

• No FEM knowledge required

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• Accuracy through physics and geometry

• Heating by components and/or currents

• Environmental conditions. Air cooling, heat sinks and heat sinks, radiation into a vacuum, and much more

• Virtual thermograms of all layers and prepregs in high resolution

• DC potential distribution and current density in nets

• Steady-state or transient

• Temperature-dependent material data

• Self and mutual inductance (inductance matrix)

• Automatically generated result tables

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• Licensing by your server

• Short to moderate computing time on laptop and PC

Request a free Trial installation ar a webdemo .

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFEwDzwApUYntiE__kJnJJQ

Good news for board designers using EAGLE! Now take over the board data with 2 clicks and start a thermal simulation with TRM. The first starts a special export .ulp, the second an import wizard. Stackup, holes, netlist and parts are automatically merged into an assembly model. Then just assign the most relevant watts and/or amps - done.
Request a test installation or an online demo by email to info@adam-research.de

Printed circuit boards with many layers, fine x-y resolution or large "pie trays" pose a numerical challenge. Up to now it was like this: the more temperature nodes to solve, the more iterations were required and it was not unlikely that unstable convergence would occur (has been got under control by internal repair mechanisms).

With Release TRM3.6, a new "Turbo" algorithm has been added, which solves the 3D temperature field about 10x faster than before. By activating multi-threading, you can possibly get even more out of it. Really demanding projects are now completed in tens of minutes instead of one or more hours.

Ask for a test installation here

My friend and colleague Doug Brooks has decided to take retirement. Therefore he has summarized his best articles and parts of his books in a new work "UltraCAD's Best".
Doug Brooks: UltraCAD's Best

Also, his calculation tools are now available for FREE instead of $250:
FREE: UltraCAD tools and calculators

Let's wish Doug lots of good times with his (big) family!

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.

TRM3.5.7 was released on 10.11.2021. At first glance, the differences seem to be small. But TRM has become much more performant for very large or high resolution boards (> 10 megapixels per layer, many layers or tens of thousands of laser vias). Also, once again some dialects in the input files are better interpreted.
You may request a test installation here

The thermal resistance "Junction-Ambient" ΘJA or RΘJA links a temperature node inside the silicon die (Junction) with the surrounding air (Ambient). "Ambient" includes everything around the component, from the pad to the air - i.e. especially the special topology of the PCB. Therefore RΘJA cannot be used to predict the temperature for a specific board. Here are some screenshots from Don't believe the data sheets. Design007 Magazine (September 2020).They show that the heat spreading on a real PCB is not perfect and that it was certainly different on the test PCB of the data sheet.

• This Arduino board is 2-layer. The parallel running tracks can improve and impede the heat spreading.

 

• Even with multilayer boards with solid inner layers, the layout can dominate the heat spreading. In this evaluation board we see that the thermal vias are in fact useless, because they are just as warm as the component, so no heat    is removed.

A TRM release is available: assign a resistor attribute (mOhm) to SMD parts to connect nets or copper geometries. Can be applied it with or without net list. The current goes through it and the voltage drop is adapted to the input value. I^2*R can be used for the heat and add to the Joule heat in traces. Also works in temperature-dependet mode.

• Simple example with resistors. Total resistance is 1 Ohm in each circuit.
• 3 half-bridges (Rdson=3 mOhm each, yellow)  with shunt resistors (5 mOhm each, green) share the current.

There are several methods for testing for the COVID-19 virus. A cost effective and fast method is real-time fluorescence analysis (RT-LAMP). More details: Vienna Corona Team

For the a defined reaction of the substrates, all samples in the carrier must be kept at the same temperature. ADAM Research participates voluntarily in the Miriam project by calculating and optimizing the voltage drop in the necessary heating loops and the resulting temperature. In the pilot calculation the heating coil is 18 meters long in a top and bottom part. TRM3 needs only a few seconds for the current density. The geometry comes from an EAGLE design and derived Gerber files. A 1 mm aluminium plate between the top and bottom heating coils has a more uneven temperature distribution than a 2 mm thick plate. The asymmetric distribution is measured qualitatively exactly the same. The aim is to become even more homogeneous and to determine the suitable materials for the next prototypes.