FROM EDN EUROPE: Link thermal- and EMC-analysis tools

Thermal analysis and EMC analysis have become integral parts of design. Design refinements in each of these processes can impact the other; to improve radiated-EMC performance you might add, for example, internal screens or baffles to your product's enclosure. However, these screens could interfere with the flow of air through the case and over the high-power-dissipation components, impairing thermal performance.

Similarly, to improve the cooling, you might alter apertures in some of the metal-case parts; but doing so might allow EMI to escape from the case. To reduce the possibility of alternating between these two design processes without arriving at a solution, Flomerics has added the facility to, in real time, directly exchange data between its Flotherm and Flo/EMC tools. You can immediately see the effect of changes you make in both areas of design. This release of the tool set (Version 4.1) lets you more easily import objects from the mechanical CAD environment (Picture). It automatically eliminates unnecessary detail from mechanical drawings to leave only the information relevant to the thermal or the EMC tools. A library manager handles the required attributes of the parts concerned and matches part numbers to locate relevant thermal data.

You can run analyses faster, to help with simultaneous exploration of thermal and EMC properties, because you can make the analysis grid for the finite volume analysis local, adding detail only where it is needed—around high-dissipation components, for example—and simplifying the calculations in other areas. You can save locally gridded parts as complete objects for reuse, meaning that when you move a part to improve airflow, the computation grid moves with it, and you need not recalculate it every time.

Flomerics is also increasing the scope of its optimisation tools. You can specify the parameters that may be altered and objectives, and the tool set seeks a solution. It first explores the design space with a series of random, design-of-experiments runs; it then chooses the best approach. Flomerics is incorporating the optimisation software of CQM (www.cqm.nl) for this process.

For thermal analysis, you can obtain thermal inputs from EDA-circuit descriptions and match them against library data; for EMC, you manually define the noise sources and obtain the properties of shielding materials from library data. The tool presents EMC results as pass/fail against regulatory limits. A further linked option in the tool set is FloStress. It lets you investigate the lifetime to failure of a mechanical part through thermal or mechanical cycling.

Flomerics, +44 20 8941 8730, www.flomerics.com.