Thermal analysis and design of air cooled electronic circuit boards using a desktop computer.

Abstract

A thermal design procedure for air cooled electronic circuit boards has been developed for the Hewlett-Packard Model 9845 desktop computer. The system of interactive programs, called THERMELEX, performs thermal analysis of printed circuit boards to predict either the junction temperatures for given power dissipation levels or the maximum power levels for given junction temperature limits. The system includes the following features: totally interactive with all input in question and answer format, simple data verification and correction capabilities, ability to store and retrieve circuit board descriptive data totally under program control, wide variety of output formats including tabular and graphical. By using internal selection of heat transfer correlations, the THERMELEX system depends only on input of physical parameters for thermal predictions.