Thermal imaging
If you look at my background, you will see that at the end of HUNT ENGINEERING we spent a long time developing some new products and because we had experienced some problems with Signal Integrity, we were trying to look at all aspects of design in a fresh light.
One of the areas that we considered was thermal, where we tried to consider the power dissipation of all devices, looking at the power and package characteristics. We quickly discovered that there were a lot of assumptions that you had to make to be able to make any predictions, and actually I believe that these assumptions make any simple predictions that you make, completely useless.
What we did was to follow our instincts, and I bought a handheld Thermal Imaging camera (Fluke Ti9), and imaged our prototypes when running different kinds of application programs.
It was fascinating, and allowed us to make changes to the rev B boards to deal with hotspots that concerned us.
Since then I have been using the Thermal imager for troubleshooting of faulty boards, broken household equipment, assessment of different cooling schemes, house/office insulation, plumbing etc.
If you want some help to assess the thermal performance of your systems, or some faultfinding where thermal imaging can help then contact me to discuss your needs free of charge. If my consulting to you can benefit us both then we can proceed from there.