Validation studies of DELPHI-type Boundary-Condition-Independent Compact Thermal Model for an opto-electronic package

A boundary-condition-independent (BCI) compact thermal model (CTM) was generated for an opto-electronic transceiver package called SFP (small form-factor pluggable device). The SFP has four internal power dissipating sources and the BCI CTM for the SFP was developed using the DELPHI methodology. This paper presents a detailed validation of the BCI CTM of the SFP in real-time applications using Flotherm, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based thermal analysis software package. The results show excellent agreement between the results predicted by the SFP CTM with the data from the detailed model and from the experiments. The SFP CTM predicts the junction temperature of the four power dissipating components and the heat flows through the sides with relative error less than 10%. In addition to accurate thermal characterization of the SFP, the SFP CTM facilitates a large order reduction (105 to 1) in the CFD-based computations. Advantages and limitations on using the DELPHI methodology for generation of CTM for the SFP are also discussed.