Mentor Graphics Blog

As with all good inventions, you quickly wonder how on earth you could have done without them before. Relieving thermal bottlenecks reduce temperatures; it’s so blindingly obvious. Now that we have the ability to visualise…read more

‘Bits stuck onto other bits’, a succinct definition of an electronic product, if not a product that contains electronics. Soldering is the method of choice for getting the components to attach to the pcb, the…read more

By far and away the most common enquiry by someone using FloTHERM, especially at the start of their adoption, is “How do I model my components?”. This is hardly surprising as the mainstay of electronics…read more

Probably due to the beer fridge, I now seem to be becoming the repository of broken electronic products with an expectation that the cause of their demise can be identified, retrospectively, using thermal simulation. This…read more

It’s estimated that, from a figure of 0.4% in 1995, now about 30% of the world’s population are ‘internet users’. Not sure exactly what being a ‘user’ entails; looking at a web page? clicking a…read more

LED based lighting is now a very hot topic (believe me, in electronic thermal management circles that used to be funny, the first few times). Control of packaged IC junction temperatures will always have a…read more

My colleague Ed and I were marvelling the other day at the CPU cooling unit from one of our training desktop PCs undergoing a repair. “What, all that just for that!?”. The CPU itself was…read more

What do you call someone who doesn’t believe in Father Christmas? A rebel without a Claus. Right, that’s that out of the way. This week Facebook announced that it plans to build a 3x 300,000…read more

‘Rubbish In -> Rubbish Out’ is a well accepted fact in the world of simulation. Regardless of the technical capabilities of your thermal simulation tool, the accuracy of prediction will always be tightly coupled to…read more

It would only have cost me an extra £170, a small extra compared to the cost of the rest of the build, but I decided against laying thermal insulation boards directly under the underfloor electric…read more

3D simulation can provide a detailed prediction of temperature and heat flux values at 10s of 1000s of points in a 3D model, experimental methods are somewhat limited in terms of the wealth of data…read more

It’s been over two years since the foundations went in for the extension we’re building on our house. In that time I’ve come to respect and somewhat rely on glib phrases such as “Good things…read more

As a FloTHERM, FloVENT or FloEFD user you might not realise it but you are part of a global and growing user community. This year we are hosting 3 ‘U2U’ (user to user) meetings in…read more

Thermal simulation of electronic systems using FloTHERM usually involve the definition of the 3D geometry and relevant material properties, specification of the power dissipation of the components as well as the ambient temperature that together lead to a numerical prediction of the resulting heat fluxes and temperatures. If the predicted component temperatures are too high [...]