Boundary Condition Independent Compact Thermal Models Enhanced by Contour Elements

Boundary Condition Independent (BCI) Compact Thermal Models (CTMs) of electronic components and packages extracted by Galerkin's projection are here enhanced by adopting contour elements for approximating the temperature and heat flux density distributions over the boundary. The proposed approach allows to greatly reduce the complexity of BCI CTMs, to simplify the coupling of BCI CTMs to the detailed thermal model of the surrounding environment and to bring to completion the obfuscation of the detailed thermal models of electronic components or packages provided by their BCI CTMs. Numerical investigations show that such improvements are achieved without sacrificing the accuracy of BCI CTMs extracted by Galerkin's projection.