The need to consider thermal issues in board design is an increasingly necessary task for signal integrity and physical design closure. Since 1999, thermal densities on boards have risen by more than 200 percent. At the same time, the need to constrain critical nets has similarly increased. This has been generating a new set of multidisciplinary design conflicts that are difficult and costly to resolve.

This TecForum will provide hardware engineers with a fundamental understanding of heat transfer at the board level, and will illustrate practical and analytical techniques for resolving electro-thermal design conflicts at the board and component level.

Alexandra Francois-St. Cyr, Senior Thermal Engineer, Flomerics, Inc.