NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

One of the most fundamental issues in electronics design is to properly cool the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) assembly. Miniaturization of modern electronics and ever-increasing complexity requires thermal management to improve reliability and maximize electrical performance. Combined with faster development cycle, earlier and more frequent simulation results are required to drive design decisions in order to avoid costly prototypes or respins. A simulation driven design approach requires efficient collaboration across the multi-disciplinary team and sufficient integration across the design tools for passing design information.

The exchange of design information is generally initiated from the electronic domain. The PCB layout designed within the Electrical CAD software needs to be exchanged with the Mechanical CAD application, where it translates into a 3D assembly model. To get accurate results, board geometry, component geometries and positions as well as the PCB stack-up layers are required to construct a model on which different heat transfer mechanisms may need to be considered: conduction, convection or radiation. Based on the environment conditions surrounding the PCB, constraints or boundary conditions are applied to the model before solving the model solution. Although all three representations (ECAD, MCAD and CAE) must be accurate, it is common to make additional simplifications to the geometry for the simulation, like filtering passive components that have little impact on the simulation result.

During this collaboration across multiple stakeholders, data synchronization between electrical and mechanical environments is often an issue as ECAD and MCAD use two sets of tools, with very different capabilities. If changes are made to the component placement or copper connections in the layout, the modifications must propagate to the 3D assembly model. The same changes must then propagate as well to the simulation model to match. If the layout changes are well identified, an update to the simulation model may be required. In a worse-case scenario, the changes are not well understood or too important, and it requires the complete recreation of the simulation model. This effort is time-consuming and error prone, considering multiple iterations can happen during the design cycle.

In this session, we will evaluate different approaches of integration between electrical, mechanical and thermal engineers, using a thermal management use case from the medical industry. The objective is to provide an integrated approach in terms of modeling associativity, team collaboration as well as design synchronization for a complete typical workflow encountered in the industry for multi-disciplinary PCB design teams. We will demonstrate an efficient exchange process between ECAD/MCAD and show how PCB thermal simulations can be optimized based electrical and mechanical constraints.