Friendly tools for the thermal simulation of power packages

Thermal simulation is a frequently needed task in the design of integrated power packaging. Thermal simulation is used in the design of new devices, in the design of the placement of the dissipating elements on the chip and for the design of the packages. Thermal simulators can help to find the best mounting solutions for the devices if they have to operate in thermally strained conditions. Thermal simulation is usually done using finite element method (FEM) based simulator programs. These are general-purpose expensive simulators, where the general usability comes together with complicated, and usually difficult to learn and difficult to use user interfaces, and these programs are relatively slow and inaccurate. To overcome these problems, we have developed two fast and easy to use 2D and 3D thermal simulator programs, SUNRED (Szekely and Rencz, 1998) and THERMAN (Csendes et al, 1998; Szekely et al, 1999). In the recent development, the first goal was to create user friendly tools which design engineers are happy to use in thermal design tasks, since the tools are fast enough to provide answers to their thermal questions almost immediately. As a result of this feature, the designers can study the effects on the thermal behavior of all modifications in the geometry of their structure or in the boundary conditions immediately on their computer screen.