Mentor Graphics Corporation today announced industry-first capabilities in the next generation of its FloTHERM® 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software for electronics cooling applications. The patent-pending technology in the FloTHERM software provides Bottleneck (Bn) and Shortcut (Sc) fields so that, for the first time, engineers can now identify where heat flow congestion occurs in the electronic design and why. It also identifies thermal shortcuts to quickly and efficiently resolve the design problem.
Together, the Bn and the Sc fields elevate the use of simulation from an observation tool which identifies heat management problems to an effective thermal design problem-solving tool which suggests potential solutions to the designer. The end result is faster and more efficient resolution of heat management problems.
“The value of FloTHERM 9 is in the time and the cost it saved us when developing an IC for a new generation of Energy Star-compliant mobile phone chargers. The baseline simulation using the ‘bottleneck’ feature quickly highlighted a potential thermal issue, and further iterations confirmed our solution,” stated Nigel Heather, vice president of engineering, CamSemi. “To achieve the same result by building prototype boards would have taken a long time and drawn resources away from other critical work. FloTHERM has helped us reduce development costs and kept our project on track to meet our customer’s aggressive deadline. www.mentor.com
