BELLEVUE, WA -- Printed circuit design expert and PCD&F contributor Doug Brooks this week released his latest book, PCB Trace and Via Currents and Temperatures: The Complete Analysis.

The new manual is a complete, thorough analysis of the relationships between PCB trace (and via) currents and trace temperatures. Brooks, who has been looking at these relationships for 20 years, cowrote the book with Dr. Johannes Adam. 

The new book covers:

• PCB materials (copper and dielectrics) and the role they play in the heating and cooling of traces; 
• The curves found in IPC-2152;
• Equations that fit those curves;
• Computer simulations that fit those curves and equations;
• Sensitivity analyses showing what happens when we vary the environment (adjacent traces and planes, changing trace lengths, thermal gradients, etc.);
• Via temperatures and what determines them;
• Via current densities; and
• Fusing issues, what happens when traces are overloaded.

There are supplemental chapters or appendices on measuring the thermal conductivity of dielectrics and measuring the resistivity of copper traces (and why many prior attempts to do so have been doomed to failure).

One chapter discusses whether industrial CT scanning might replace microsections for measuring trace parameters.

The new tome is available through Amazon.

Brooks is also author of Signal Integrity and Printed Circuit Design, and PCB Currents: How They Flow, How They React.