One in five electronics engineers experience thermal issues

Thermal simulation tool provider Future Facilities has conducted a survey of over 350 professional electronics engineers in an effort to learn how they cope with thermal issues. The results have been published in the report ‘The Heat is On’, which highlights how thermal considerations are often neglected — particularly early in the design process.

Published by Future Facilities’ 6SigmaET team, the report found 40% of engineers consider thermal considerations to be a low priority in their current design process, below product reliability, complying with regulations, innovative new features, reducing costs and reducing time to production. Additionally, 14% of engineers think that thermal considerations do not matter when planning their designs, and 13% do not even test the thermal performance of their designs.

The irony here is that by not prioritising thermal management, designers and engineers are “setting themselves up for failure in the long term”, according to the report. It states that 99.5% of engineers have had a product derailed by late-stage complications, with one in five specifically identifying thermal issues as a common cause of their delays.

As explained by the report, many engineers simply believe that their designs are too low power for thermal issues to be worth considering. Furthermore, those engineers who do consider thermal issues are likely to try to overengineer products, adding unnecessary components such as heatsinks and fans rather than identifying the optimum solution. However, the report highlights that even small, low-power devices require significant planning when it comes to thermal design.

According to the report, one in three engineers agree that they should be devoting more time to thermal management, but more than half (55%) can’t see how they could bring thermal considerations any further forward in their design processes. The answer, according to the report, is simulation.

“By using simulation, engineers can experiment with different design options, identifying where their devices are likely to overheat and addressing those issues without overengineering their designs,” the report stated. “Through the use of the latest simulation tools, designers are even able to run multiple variations of their designs over the cloud; this allows them to test different design layouts without producing costly physical prototypes.”

The report concludes with three tips for keeping thermal at the heart of your design:

1. Bring thermal to the forefront. Considering potential thermal issues from the outset not only saves designers time and budget, it is also the best way to maximise the efficiency of their designs.
2. Take a combined design verification approach. By combing early-stage simulation with late-stage prototypes, electronic engineers can achieve a best-of-both-worlds approach.
3. Remember that thermal management is about more than whether a component overheats. Effective thermal design is an issue which affects everything: product reliability, energy efficiency, device weight and even whether a device is too noisy.

The full report can be downloaded from the 6SigmaET website.