PCB tracks thermal simulation, analysis and comparison to IPC-2152 for electrical current carrying capacity

Abstract

Along with the introduction of the new IPC-2152 standard came several questions: What has changed? How does this new standard affect the PCB design? Are the simulation programs up to date with the standard? And the most important: In practice, how close are we to the standard? In this research, we developed a series of tests to analyze the real thermal behavior of tracks when charged with different constant currents. We used boards with different thicknesses (FR4 0.8mm, FR4 1.6mm, FR2 1.6mm, CEM 1.6mm) and 35um copper thickness and 1mm track width. We also performed simulations of the structures using Ansys. All the results were compared to IPC-2152 standard.