ASCENT: Analyzing Electrical Stress, Aging, and Faults of PCB Components

Component heating, Joule heating, heat sinks…does the very idea of checking the stress of hundreds of devices on a board for various operating conditions make you reach for a cup of coffee?

• Is a ¼ Watt resistor dissipating 1/3 Watts?
• Does a 50 V capacitor suffer from constant spikes of 100 Volts?
• A value of a 100-ohm resistor changes to 115 ohms at a temperature of 60 degrees?
• Can the power-handling capability of a 1 Watt BJT go down to 0.75 Watts at a higher temperature?
• Is a transformer with a dielectric breakdown of 500 V under constant stress of 1000 V spikes?

Thousands of components, increasing complexity, device failures, PCBs with a mix of digital, analog, RF, and mechanical content, hard-to-come-by simulation models for ICs, FPGAs, semi-conductors, and many more challenges…that’s the reality of today’s electronic designs. And let’s not forget that simulation often takes a lot of time for complex, mixed-signal designs.

OK. Let’s take a deep breath. What if you have a model-less solution? You do not need models to analyze device stress. The solution also has the ability to debug, analyze, and fix stressed components in the context of the relevant circuit. Thermal analysis, you ask? Easy. The actual self-heating values of devices can be sent to any thermal tool to auto-seed device power dissipations instead of putting the rough values through datasheets. What’s more, the solution analyzes and near-instantly reports problems in the design and presents them in an easy-to-read user interface.

Analyze digital, analog, RF, and mixed-signal systems by automatically splitting a PCB design into small self-contained circuits, which are auto simulated. And, it’s simple. Also, assign your own models for better accuracy through the Electrical Stress Settings dialog.

The benefits? Instant reporting of schematic integrity and component electrical overstress with cross probing, automatic categorization of device sub-types, intuitive results, model assignment, and result filtering!

Detect schematic design errors based on component parameters and rules, thereby reducing design time and increasing design reliability. Use the Schematic Audit and Electrical Stress Settings dialogs to easily modify the required parameters and configure the rules you want to run.
 

And, we’ve got you covered. You can run a reliability analysis of Allegro^® System Capture, OrCAD^® Capture, and Design Entry HDL designs. So, why wait? Use Design Integrity and perform schematic integrity checks to ensure the correctness of a circuit in terms of component usage, values, polarity, net topology, connection polarity, and so on. Follow this up by electrical overstress calculation through estimated simulations.

In part 2 of this blog post, we look at a few rules that you can run, such as checks for single-connection nets, power nets without voltage, or differential pair net polarity mismatches.

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