Physics (Thermal Analysis / Current Simulation)

Plug-In category: Developer Tools, Simulation Plug-In included in: PCBI Physics

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!

In the News: Perform thermal simulation in early layout stage

Thermische Simulation bereits beim Leiterplatten-Layout

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 (**).
- 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 (*)

(*) depends a lot on the amount of layers, the PCB board size and the choosen simulation resolution
(**) we achieved fantastic results with a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 and NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 TI

Watch our PCB-Investigator Physics Videos here:

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