A Tool for Thermal Analysis of Electronic Boards with Multiple Heat Sources and Sinks

A tool for performing the thermal analysis of circuit printed boards is presented. The dissipative components are considered as rectangular heat sources having certain thermal resistance for coupling to the board. The board is fixed by a frame, which provides conditions for heat output (heat sinks), defined by contact thermal resistances. Additionally, a side heat transfer under the assumption of linearity is considered.

The core algorithm is based on the analytical steady-state solution obtained by the technique of integral transforms. As the results, the temperatures of all components and the 2D temperature maps over the board are computed out without introducing a numerical grid.

The tool is written in FORTRAN 77; the input-output data are text files, whose format is adopted for using spreadsheets like EXCEL, as well as available software for 1D and 2D plotting.