Thermal Management Techniques to Overcome Heating Challenges in Printed Circuit Boards

Nowadays, Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design is facing critical challenges like high heat dissipation, increased cost, densely populated components and reduced life span. In view of the above, present study is focused on temperature prediction, thermal management, and optimization of component allocation (e.g. mosfet) in PCB. Heat flow occurring from traces to different copper layers in the PCB can cause adverse effects such as thermal run away/PCB warpage. Here, transient thermal analysis is carried out in an in-house developed PCB which is placed inside a sheet metal enclosure. Initially, thermal prediction to explore thermal regimes in the PCB is performed with the help of a commercially available software Altair Simlab ElectroFlo 2024.1. Temperature across all the components of the PCB as well as at the enclosure is simulated which is found to be beneficial in identifying the critical hotspots. In addition to the above, thermal measurements are performed in the lab with the help of thermal imager to correlate the predicted values of temperature in the PCB. A good agreement (85% correlation) is observed between both the predicted and measured values of temperature. Hotspot is found to be a microcontroller in contrast to the expected hotspot which is a mosfet with a high heat dissipation. For the inputs given for the thermal analysis, the PCB is found to be safe as the observed temperature is found to be less than the safe operating temperature limit of 70oC. Due to some limitations in changing the PCB design, thermal management has been ensured in an innovative way by providing a bump in the lower plate of the PCB enclosure to take away the extra heat dissipated from a cluster of resistors located in a particular section of the PCB.