Physics (Thermal Analysis / Current Simulation)

PCB-Investigator Physics is the perfect tool to simulate the physical behaviour of your printed circuit boards during the development phase.

It enables you to find thermal hotspots, critical trace resistances and voltage drops that are too high, even before prototyping begins!

With the built-in editing functions of PCB-Investigator Physics it’s even possible to optimize the layout and stack-up to achieve the best possible physical behaviour with only a few clicks!

Save valuable time and prototype costs with the thermal analysis and current simulation of PCBi-Physics!

To get information about the physical behaviour of your printed circuit board during operation, the thermal simulation and current flow simulation of PCB-Investigator Physics enables you to simulate the following physical properties:

• The temperature raise at each location caused by power loss of components or by high currents
• The current density, e.g. at copper bottlenecks or in drills
• The voltage drop and copper resistance between any pins on any layer
• animation of current flow

With the version V10, you are now able to do also transient simulations!
This enables you to find out how the PCB heats up or cools down over time! This simulation also considers time-dependent switching states and power losses, so-called operation states (see video tutorial #6).

All simulation results can be documented in an interactive HTML report.
An example for such a report file can be found here.

User Guide:
A detailed user manual can be found here.

Welcome to the new world of simulations - with PCB-Investigator Physics!

System recommendation:

• CPU: Intel i5/i7/i9
• RAM: Minimum 16GB, better 32GB (*)
• GPU: Optional, but simulating with a GPU is up to 12x faster than with a CPU (**).
  Requirements:
  • NVIDIA Graphics Card with CUDA 5.0 or higher (https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus)
  • We recommend at least 768 CUDA Cores, better would be 2560 or more
  • Minimum 4GB Graphics Card Memory, better would be 8GB or more (*)

Watch our PCB-Investigator Physics Videos here:

Tutorial 1: How to use PCB Investigator Physics
(» download video)

Tutorial 2: Improve thermal behaviour by using different materials
(» download video)

Tutorial 3: Improve thermal behaviour by optimizing the copper structure of your layout and adding thermal vias
(» download video)

Tutorial 4: Improve thermal behaviour by adding a Heat Sink to a component with high power dissipation
(» download video)

Tutorial 5: Improve thermal behaviour by adding an Insulated Metal Substrate (IMS / Aluminum Plate) to the bottom side of the PCB
(» download video)

Tutorial 6: Time-depending transient simulations with different operation states
(» download video)

(This plugin is only available in the PCB Investigator Physics Edition! Contact us to get a free trial version!)