Thermal Analysis of Components and Traces on Printed Circuit Boards

High currents flowing through various traces of a printed circuit boards (PCB) causes thermal run away and PCB warpage due to the occurrence of high heat density. The present study discusses on steady state thermal analysis performed in a PCB kept inside an enclosure. Thermal analysis allows PCB designer to quickly move and confirm the component’s placement by examining the temperature plots predicted on the PCB surface. A PCB particularly designed for automated manual transmission (AMT) application employed in Ashok Leyland electric vehicle (EV) trucks is used for this present study. The performed simulations are preliminary level and carried out with commercially available software Altair Simlab ElectroFlo 2022.3. Simlab is a PCB level EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software suite used for design and analysis, and thus helps in minimizing the development cycles. The power dissipation for each and every component and the component analysis power level plays a significant role in deciding the temperature at various components in the PCB. The temperature at various locations of the PCB and enclosure is predicted and compared with some benchmark values presently available and measured at the vehicle level. A good agreement is observed between both the predicted and measured values. Here, the objective is to detect these thermal issues at the initial design level itself, so as to improve reliability of the controller.