Patent ID: 8601428

Claim:
A method for heuristic determination and thermal analysis of component placement on a printed circuit board (“PCB”) for use in a portable computing device (“PCD”), the method comprising: receiving at a computer one or more selections of PCBs suitable for use in the PCD; receiving at the computer one or more thermal energy generating components to reside on the PCB, wherein receiving a thermal energy generating component includes the entry of specification data associated with the component; heuristically determining with the computer a plurality of layouts for the selected one or more thermal energy generating components on the PCB; receiving at the computer a selection of one or more use cases under which the heuristically determined layouts of components will be evaluated, wherein each use case includes the entry of performance data associated with the selected thermal energy generating components; and evaluating with the computer the heuristically determined layouts by generating a predicted thermal footprint for each layout according to each use case, wherein a use case is associated with one of gaming, graphical data transceiving, voice data transceiving, and video recording.