Acquisition Expands Thermal Design Offerings

May 4, 2005 1:40 PM

Flomerics has announced the acquisition of MicReD, a Hungarian-based company formed in 1997 as a spin-off from Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE). MicReD’s main product is the “T3Ster” (pronounced “Trister”), which provides fast, repeatable and accurate thermal characterization of IC devices, including stacked-die and system-in-package devices.

Organizations already using the T3Ster include IBM, Infineon, Intel, Nokia, Philips, Samsung and ST Microelectronics. These companies also are users of the Flotherm thermal analysis software from Flomerics. This acquisition supports Flomerics’ core business and represents a significant step for Flomerics toward providing a complete thermal-design solution for its customers.

The need for Flomerics’ thermal analysis software is primarily driven by the increasing miniaturization and thermal densities of electronic devices. Exactly the same trends drive the need for the T3Ster.

John Parry, research manager for Flomerics, said, “Flomerics and MicReD worked together for several years on the EC-funded PROFIT* research project to develop transient thermal models of chip packages that accurately capture the thermal behavior of even the most complex IC devices. The T3Ster embodies the knowledge and technology gained in this project to automate the measurement procedure and enable thermal models to be generated directly from the measurements. These validated models are then used in thermal design software such as Flotherm and Flo/PCB to predict how a device will perform in a particular end-user application.”

“What’s particularly interesting about MicReD’s approach is just how flexible the instrumentation and software are,” said Parry. “The equipment can also characterize other temperature-sensitive components, such as power LEDs, or mechanical components critical to thermal management, such as heat pipes, micro-fluidic coolers and heat sinks (for which reliable design data is often hard to come by), or deduce the thermal resistance values for interface materials and gap fillers. Consequently, the T3Ster is highly complementary to Flomerics software tools.”

In addition to Flomerics and MicReD, other partners in the PROFIT research project included Philips Research (coordinating), ST Microelectronics, Infineon Technologies, Philips Semiconductors, Technical University of Budapest, TIMA, CQM and Nokia. The project ended in December 2003.

For more information, visit www.flomerics.com.

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