Computer-Aided Heat Sink Design for Printed Wiring Boards.

Abstract

A computer-aided design (CAD) program has been developed which generates a graphical layout of a printed wiring board (PWB) showing its fundamental characteristics, automatically performs a heat sink design for conductively cooled in-line PWBs, and sets up a working data base containing generated thermal characteristics for subsequent thermal and reliability analysis. The program was designed to interface with an existing computer- aided component layout and routing routine and to be user interactive.