Automatic Model Generation of Power Printed Circuit Boards Based on Open Standards

Printed Circuit Board technology is increasingly used to design power electronic converters. Advanced electronics Computed-Aided Design (eCAD) tools allow us to describe the implementation of such a converter fully. Here, we investigate the automatic generation of electrical and thermal models from eCAD designs, using an open standard data exchange format (IPC-2581). We implement a simplification method because PCB designs have many intricate details (in particular, they may contain thousands of micro-vias). This allows to build 3D FEM models which can be simulated in a reasonable time, with very little assistance from the designer.