PCB Thermal Analysis

I have a very small board that I would like to model for thermal analysis. I am pretty confident that I can get by with a first order analysis since I only want to know if I have a prayer of a chance of dissipating the heat from this board, rather than a detailed analysis of the range of temperatures across the board. I was thinking about drawing a simple spice circuit with current to represent heat, resistors to represent thermal resistance and voltage to represent temperature.

Sounds pretty simple, right? But even after doing some web searching, I have no idea where to find details on the thermal conductivity of PCB material and the values to use for transmitting heat from the board to the air. I am surprised that this is not commonly used, but it appears that most IC data just *assumes* that your board is large enough that it is a good heatsink. I did not find a single reference with info on the PCB.

Am I not looking hard enough? Can anyone point me to the raw data on PCB thermal characteristics I need for this analysis?

Reply to
rickman
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You could try asking a manufacturer of PCB laminate, I'd have thought that it would be a fairly common request and they should have the figures.

The PCB software I use (Pulsonix) has an interface for the Betasoft thermal analysis program, which presumably includes modeling for the PCB material. You might be able to find something relevant on the Betasoft web site.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

There is a book: "The Electronics of Radio" by David Rutledge of Caltech.

There is a section in there deaking with thermal analysis.

Dave

Reply to
EE123

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