Novel Gerber File-based Numerical Modeling and Simulation for Thermal Analysis of Printed Circuit Boards

Printed circuit boards have been commonly used in various power converters covering a wide range of power levels for reliability, low cost, and ease of mass production. Increasing the performance of PCBs used in power converters requires more holistic modeling of their thermal performance. This can be difficult without the use of expensive and complicated software, such as Ansys. This paper presents the development of a novel Gerber file-based numerical modeling and simulation solution for the thermal analysis of PCBs that can be used for analysis and evaluation of the thermal performance of a given PCB design using standard PCB design files. The proposed approach considers both the heat generated by components and the PCB traces. The proposed modeling and analysis allow the researchers and engineers to understand the PCB thermal performance quickly and accurately using the PCB design files that they are familiar with. Hardware results are provided to validate the proposed novel solution with an average error of less than 8% for different PCB design scenarios under various load conditions.