Mentor Graphics unveils IC package thermal characterization and design tool

摘要

Mentor Graphics Corp. unveiled its FloTHERM IC productivity tool targeting the semiconductor industry for thermal characterization and design at the SEMI-THERM Symposium (Feb. 21-25, Santa Clara, CA USA). The new tool is a Web-based platform that automates the design tasks associated with full-spectrum thermal characterization and validation.rnIan Clark, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics, told SST that the metrics in the tool are generated by the software automatically placing the package of interest in a virtual representation of the standard JEDEC test environmentsrnand performing a calculation using the tool's solver. In one example (Figure 1), he noted that the metric of interest is the junction-to-moving air thermal resistance (Θjma). The tool output shows the surface temperatures of the test board and package in the free post-processing viewer, FloVIZ. "For this metric, the appropriate JEDEC test environment is the moving air (forced convection) configuration," explained Clark.