Automatic Generation of Thermal Models for PCB-based Power Electronics

Inhalt:
An automated workflow transforms the board design of a power converter circuit into a thermal equivalent-circuit model (TECM) that describes the thermal behaviour of power chips. It uses commercial software (Altium, ANSYS Icepak, LTSpice), with custom code handling data transfer and model preparation in between. Some systematic simplifications are proposed to speed up the calculation. This workflow is illustrated using an example case and the results are compared with experimental measurements (thermal impedance measurement).