FEA applications in DOE and design optimization

FEA (finite element analysis) has been widely used to simulate package behaviour in the recent years and proved to be a powerful tool to obtain a better understanding of package performance. However, as FEA becomes increasingly popular, new requirements are raised. Among them are the feasibility of using FEA to do DOE and design optimizations. In these applications, the packages have similar geometry but the component parameters (dimensions and material properties) are changeable. APDL (Ansys Parametric Design Language) was used to write FEA programs which can automatically build the required model, solve it, retrieve the results and do other complicated operations and calculations. By using this kind of programs, FEA becomes a powerful tool for DOE (design of experiments) and design optimizations.