Two thirds of thermal engineers must spend a day or more solving their designs, limiting efficiency and time-to-market

Despite legacy systems, industry-wide research finds thermal engineers still refuse to update

66 per cent of thermal engineers must wait at least a day for their thermal simulations to solve. That’s according to the new State of Thermal report from 6SigmaET, which asked 170 thermal engineers in the electronics industry – including users of nine of the top thermal simulation suites – to share their views on thermal simulation.

Thermal simulations of electronics are being modelling in ever increasing detail requiring specialist software and powerful hardware. While 66 per cent of thermal engineers must spend a day or more waiting for their equations to solve, 32 per cent can complete this step in under an hour. This suggests a drastic difference in the capabilities of the thermal simulation packages currently on the market.

6SigmaET’s research also highlights a number of other bottlenecks within the traditional thermal simulation process. 39 per cent of thermal engineers must spend over an hour simply importing their CAD models from a design suite into their current simulation platform. 51 per cent also consider the initial model creation stage to be too slow.

Despite these concerns however, 60 per cent of thermal engineers have not switched simulation provider for over three years, while almost half have never switched.

Commenting on these findings, Tom Gregory, product manager at 6SigmaET said: “Given the advancements made in thermal engineering over the last ten years, it’s concerning to see so many engineers still relying on outdated processes and technology to complete their designs. Through advancements such as cloud-solving, there is no reason why engineers should be spending days solving their simulations.

“Our research surveyed users of nine of the world’s leading thermal simulation packages. This analysis highlights significant loyalty, with many engineers preferring to maintain a slow or unreliable system that they know, rather than switch to a more modern – yet less familiar – tool. To address this, we believe that many of today’s simulation providers must look to simplify their suites, increasingly automating processes to cut down build times, speed up solving and ultimately shorten the average time-to-market for designs. By incorporating the latest cloud-solving technology, a familiar user interface designed to mimic traditional business software packages, an unstructured-grid solver and automated processes, the latest version of 6sigmaET overcomes all of these issues.”

To download a copy of 6SigmaET’s State of Thermal report visit: https://www.6sigmaet.info/whyswitch