Survey highlights issues in physical design

Flomerics has recently completed a survey of physical/mechanical design engineers in the electronics industry that identified some of their major concerns.

Flomerics has recently completed a survey of physical/mechanical design engineers in the electronics industry that identified some of their major concerns.

40% confirmed that thermal management was the "most significant and expensive" design challenge they face and 49% of the respondents have changed a board layout for thermal reasons within the past 6 months.

For 19% of respondents, basic mechanical design was identified as their greatest challenge, followed by electromagnetic compatibility for 14%.

The survey also showed that 39% of the engineers said that better interfaces between their electronic design automation (EDA) and mechanical design software would make a big difference in improving the collaboration between electronic design engineers and mechanical design engineers at their company.

In response to a question about which aspects of design and layout of printed circuit boards are commonly influenced by mechanical designers, 67% identified "heatsink keep-out area".

Only 35% said that "optimising component layout from a thermal standpoint" was an aspect of design they could influence.

Other parts of the survey zeroed in more specifically on the role of thermal analysis in the design process.

When asked which software tools need most to interoperate with thermal simulation software, 64% said mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) software and 19% said EDA software.

As far as the reasons why board-level thermal analysis software is not in widespread use by electronics engineers (EEs) at their company, 31% said that EEs are not responsible or are too busy to use thermal analysis software, and 29% pointed to the limited functionality and accuracy of current board-level tools.

Only 8% of the engineers in the survey currently use software to simulate electromagnetic compatibility.

Of the large majority that does not yet simulate EMC, 22% said the main reason was scepticism as to whether EMC problems can really be predicted by simulation software and 20% said their company doesn't have a clearly defined person or group responsible for EMC issues.

The survey respondents, who are all users of Flomerics software, were nearly unanimous in their willingness to recommend it.

60% said they would strongly recommend Flomerics' products and services to others and another 38% said they would recommend them.

Overall, 11% said they were extremely satisfied with Flomerics' products and services, 68% said they were very satisfied, and 15% said they were fairly satisfied.

Strong customer support is clearly one reason for these high levels of satisfaction.

"We have been Flomerics users for several years and I have dealt with customer support for several different applications", said Eric Madsen, Thermal Simulation Engineer for Micron Technology, Boise, Idaho.

"If the problem is a bug they don't try to snow me but instead show me a workaround.

I have never had a situation where I have been dead in the water".

Doug Wehrly, Senior Mechanical Design Engineer for Staktek, Austin, Texas, said: "We provide Flomerics models of our high-density memory to our customers who incorporate them in their own system level models.

When our customers mentioned that their models were getting too large, Flomerics worked with us and with our customers to apply localised gridding technology to reduce the size of the models by 50%".

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