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The Simcenter Flotherm team recently released a new capability that I believe will revolutionize the electro-thermal design process! It is called BCI ROM (Boundary Condition Independent – Reduced Order Model) technology, a modeling approach to capture accurate thermal characteristics from a 3D analysis, ready for use in 1D circuit simulation.

This article describes a method to perform accurate electro-thermal simulations for circuits that operate in switch-mode. This approach addresses the fundamental problem of these divergent requirements:
• The need to simulate long periods of “virtual circuit operation”, due to long thermal settling times
• The need for small simulation time-steps, due to high switching frequencies and fast, non-linear device behavior

Virtual Teardown

When I saw the original advertisement  for the Ember coffee mug, I was drawn to it like a Seattleite to a Starbucks. I knew that I had to get one and would then inevitably spend my weekend trying to figure out precisely how it works.

A colleague of mine, a thermal design engineer, once made a comment that I’ll never forget. I was simulating a power electronics circuit and I placed a scope probe on a transistor model and plotted the power dissipation. Its value was of course changing over time, as the circuit’s operating state was varied during the simulated test scenario. He exclaimed: “You have a Power Fairy!”