Why Gauss Stack?
The Old Paradigm: Design, Fail, Start Over, Respin
The current electronic design and validation process is slow and peppered with many pain points, chief among which is the inability to simulate board level reliability performance at the design stage. The stackup is an afterthought, whereas it has to be the first stage in the process.
The New Paradigm: Gauss Stack
With Gauss Stack, you can replace the old process with a true Computational Testbed so that you can catch failure modes and design to prevent them right at the outset, during the stackup design stage. No more test vehicles. No more respins. No more headaches. Just products that go to market quickly and work as intended.
Computational Prototyping of PCBs
Predicting Reliability of Printed Circuit Boards basically means either:
Building expensive test vehicles for the worst-case scenario. However, this concept is flawed, since each stackup is different, as the materials used are composites of polymers, metals and reinforcements, such as glass, and the properties are a combination of these constituents, which change significantly with each design. For example, there may be a worst-case Signal Integrity scenario, but it may not be the worst case for other equally important attributes, like early CAF failure or Reliability. Additionally, test vehicles are expensive & time-consuming, and every change requires a rebuild of the test Vehicles. The major issues are that the user can’t run all possible configurations. Costs run beyond 1 M or higher, if assembly level performance needs to be assessed.
OR
Simulating using Finite Element Analysis, which is relatively less expensive, but not a viable solution. The finest feature, such as copper thickness is of the order of ~18 µm or lower and the largest dimension can run up to 500-1000 mm. A true high-fidelity model is not possible with the current computational technologies. Non-Linear analysis convergence issues, shear locking, and aspect ratio constraints make this not viable, except for small regions of the board. Most critically, the orthotropic properties required per layer are not available – testing for these properties for every design and every layer is not feasible (and some of these properties cannot be reliably measured). Finite Element Analysis is in all but a few specific cases a futile exercise in the context of PCB reliability analysis.
New Approach using Gauss Stack
The highly accurate and verified approach as outlined below makes the Computational Prototyping of Printed Circuit Boards a cinch.
Begin Computationally Prototyping PCBs with Gauss Stack Today!