Using SIWave and IcePak for PCB Thermal Analysis

Hello everyone, this is Daniel Esmaili from Ozen Engineering Incorporation. I'm going to talk about using SIWave and IcePak for a PCB thermal analysis.

In today's presentation, I'll use this PCB board and show you how we can read different temperatures at different points of the PCB and perform a DCI analysis where the current might increase the temperature, and that temperature increase or decrease may alter the behavior of your copper or other traces and change the effect of current.

We are an ELITE channel partner of ANSYS. We use multi-physical simulation to solve multidisciplinary engineering problems. We have expertise in FEA, CFD, and high and low-frequency electromagnetics problems and projects.

If you have any questions or need any software or support, feel free to reach out at [support@asozening.com](mailto:support@asozening.com). IcePak is a great software for thermal analysis. It can be coupled with Maxwell, Q3D, HFSS 3D layout, HFSS, and SIWave.

I won't cover these today, but I wanted to mention the coupling between the software. For example, you can use the DCI solver in HFSS 3D layout to calculate the power density, voltage profile, and temperature profile of your PCB port.

You can connect it to IcePak by coupling or exporting the file from HFSS 3D layout and then importing it to IcePak. This applies to other software as well. Now, let's look at the PCB board I showed you earlier. It has a few components and different layers.

I'll zoom out a little bit to give you a sense of the complexity of the PCB. The very first thing we need to do is check the PCB board and verify or sanitize it. We can use a wizard flow to do this.

We go to stack pad, change or modify whatever is needed, check the thickness type and conductivity, and change the different parameters. Once we check it and make sure everything is fine, we hit okay. We follow the same process for a verified pad stack circuit element parameter and sanitize it.

Once we do that, we can look at different pad stacks and change the ratio as needed. We have capacitors, inductors, resistors, and voltage and current sources for the chips that alter the current of the circuit.

We verify this automatically, and the software differentiates between something that is non-power and something that is power net. If there is a specific net that you are aware of, you can do that manually and change them up and down. Next, we go to sanitize.

Once we do that, we need to go to the DCIR analysis, where the thermal analysis is started. We choose some nets, hide the RLC, and make sure we have current sources and voltage sources. If there is no current or voltage source, it doesn't make sense to do the DCIR.

We hit configure the simulation and validate it. We can do the validation before or after; it doesn't matter. We choose what we want to check and click okay. Once the progress starts, we can see if there are any errors that need to be changed manually or if the software can auto-fix them.

We always try to go through those auto-fixes and make sure they make sense. In the end, we have the last object, which is to modify the fan manufacturer like me. We click here and select it as the simulation button.

Then, when we go to the simulation results section, we can uncheck or check this box. It's good to check it because it gives you some files that you can exhibit if needed. We can set a uniform design temperature and put different temperatures here, usually 20 or 25 Celsius.

Then, we launch the simulation. Once the simulation is done, we can plot the current and voltage and look at the power at different layers. We can choose the power layer and show the power here. We can also look at the voltage and J, which shows us where the current is going.

We can export the IcePak power map if we want to use it in IcePak. At this point, we are not going to do that. Instead, we'll click on IcePak and start simulating for the thermal analysis. We choose the setup name and choose the DC power convergence we want to do.

The DCIR simulation gives the power output based on the IcePak power output. The DCI is the same as the DC power ring, and the temperature map generated by the DC work goes back to the PCB. This loop continues till the convergence is below the point we set.

We can choose the thermal environment, natural convection, gravity vectors, and the temperature of the fan. We can also choose the temperature of the fan padding and the height of the fan. Once we make sure everything is fine, we click launch. This will take a while.

After the simulation is done, we see the result. There are three iterations for DCI-R and two iterations for iSpec. The result went to iSpec, and iSpec ran the simulation. However, it wasn't close to the threshold we set, so it ran it again. We can right-click and say display temperature.

The temperature at different locations is shown. We can move our mouse around and see the temperature at different locations. When we add cooling and a fan, this can change. We can go to DC on the left and hit the button on the right. The temperature will decrease.

This is how we do the thermal analysis in SIWave. We can move our mouse around and see the temperature at different locations. Thank you for watching. This is Daniel Esmaili from Ozen Engineering Corporation, where we use multi-physical simulation to solve multi-disciplinary engineering problems.

We have expertise in FEA, CFD, and high and low-frequency electromagnetics. If you have any questions or need any software or support, please feel free to reach out at [support@asozening.com](mailto:support@asozening.com). Have a wonderful day.