There are two golden rules to thermal design: start simple and start early. The heat-flow path from the junction to the ambient, usually air in the local environment, determines a component’s ...

It’s costly and time-consuming to determine the causes of hotspots on circuit boards, and to attempt to arrive at a “well-tempered” board through multiple iterations once a prototype is approved. A ...

In a previous article, “A Close Look at Facts and Myths About Thermal Vias,” we used a thermal simulation model called Thermal Risk Management, or TRM, to model thermal vias. Thermal vias, almost by ...

Joule heating, also known as resistive or Ohmic heating, is the power lost to heat as electrical current flows down a conductor. We were introduced to Joule’s first law (Power dissipation = I²R, VI, ...

Throughout the electronics industry, submicron feature size at the die level are driving package component sizes down to the design-rule level of the early technologies. Today’s integrated circuit (IC ...

The simulation tracks a satellite's surface and internal temperature changes as it orbits Earth, considering varying thermal inputs from sunlight and Earth's shadow. Monte Carlo radiation modeling ...