Electronic components including printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs) are subjected to various loads caused by handling, assembling, and operation conditions. The loads can be of static, dynamic, or thermo-mechanic form, which all result basically in bending of the PCBA and in applying stress to surface mounted devices, solder joints, vias, and traces. Thus, PCBAs have to qualified according to standardized tests like:
At Elastic-Simulations we developed specialized and automated simulation processes for the static, dynamic, and thermo-mechanic analysis of PCBAs which can be used to reproduce these loads virtually. The simulation processes were developed with cloud infrastructure in mind; thus, the simulation complexity can be scaled based on the technical requirements and cost requirements of our customers. At Elastic-Simulations we believe that modelling of geometric details is key to retrieve accurate simulation results. Thus, our processes are based on detailed finite element models of solder joints, vias, and traces. Based on the cost requirements of our customers these detailed models can be used directly in the simulations or can be simplified to sub-structures or sub-models.