Sigrity intros industry’s first and only electrical and thermal co-simulation tool

CAMPBELL, USA: Sigrity Inc., a leader in signal and power integrity solutions, today announced PowerDC Thermal – new software that works in concert with the company’s popular PowerDC Electrical simulation software to create the industry’s first and only integrated thermal/electrical analysis environment for IC packages and printed circuit boards.

Sigrity’s breakthrough PowerDC Thermal product eliminates manual iterations between simulations with separate electrical and thermal tools, reduces time, and improves results convergence. It is ideal for avoiding field failures.

“Our customers find an increasing number of IC package and printed circuit board designs must safely operate at high current levels,” said Dr. An-Yu Kuo, Director of Thermal and Mechanical Products of Sigrity. “The new Sigrity integrated thermal and electrical co-simulation environment provides unprecedented accuracy and ease of use for assessing potential field failure risks such as smoke and fire.”

PowerDC thermal simulation fully considers both die heating and copper heating on the package and the board, and also takes temperature and location dependencies into account. Such precision simulation has not been available until now. Up to this point, design teams either have relied on overly pessimistic IPC peak temperature estimates, or thermal simulations that fail to fully account for the critical impact of high current density.

The new PowerDC automated environment with co-simulation maximizes accuracy by leveraging powerful electrical current density analysis, computing accurate thermal temperature distributions, and iterating on the combined effects. Thus, it fully considers factors such as the increasing electrical resistance at higher operating temperatures. Similarly, the converged results accurately reflect the impact of the increasing component power dissipation that takes place as temperatures rise.

Design files from all popular printed circuit board and IC package layout systems can be imported seamlessly into Sigrity’s electrical/thermal co-simulation environment. In addition, the die model from popular IC design tools can be included. Analysis can proceed on designs that are partially or fully placed and routed. The comprehensive simulations account for complex plane shapes, including cut-outs, wires, solder balls, solder bumps, and via structures to maximize accuracy.

Sigrity’s unique task-based workflow and the included constraint manager simplify set-up and make results easy to interpret. A range of reporting options as well as electrical and thermal color maps enable users to see the converged results so they can rapidly pinpoint improvement options.

Sigrity’s new thermal and co-simulation capabilities are available as an add-on option to Sigrity’s PowerDC – the industry leading DC analysis tool with a reputation for ease-of-use, fast throughput, accuracy and its patent-pending technology for automatically finding best remote sense locations. An electrical and thermal combined product also is available for new customers.