Automatic unstructured mesh generation approach for simulation of electronic packaging system

An automatic unstructured mesh generation approach is presented to discretize complex electronic packaging systems for finite element analysis. Various novel schemes are developed to resolve the common issues (models contain geometrical defects, models contain small but necessary features, simulation properties are predefined on models, etc.) to automate the entire mesh generation pipeline. These schemes include employing Boolean operations with a few technical considerations to resolve the geometrical defects of the original model, defining a sizing function that can adapt to small features, and developing a new data structure named the unified topology model to connect a CAD model and the mesh resulting from the model. The proposed approach can generate quality meshes on certain models with geometrical defects, while state-of-the-art open-source tools (Netgen and Gmsh) generate nonconforming meshes on those models. Tests on complex configurations show that the proposed approach can achieve a speed-up of 3–5 times in comparison with state-of-the-art commercial tools (e.g., COMSOL Multiphysics). Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed approach can create a mesh with satisfactory quality.