Effectiveness:The electric signals are routed through multiple layers in the board where all layers are distinctly different in functionality. On the other hand, thermal analysis relies upon heat transfer that is a diffusional process. Since the board is thin, temperatures are different along the surface of the board but smeared across layers. In general, the temperature variation along the surface of the board could be on the order of 30 degrees, while the temperature difference across the layers at any location would be on the order of 1-2 degrees. BETAsoft thermal analysis takes advantage of this nature to model the heat transfer of a board using a default modeling technique of one layer. This approach maintains great accuracy, as validated by hundreds of users over 18 years, but simplifies the modeling efforts significantly. For local consideration, the local value of metal fraction and cut outs (if applicable) can be implemented. For special applications (frequently on military and Avionic systems), two PCBs are attached from each side of a thick metal plate to allow for effective heat conduction to the wedge lock at edges. BETAsoft recommends the use of 3 layers in this type of modeling with the layer 2 being the metal plate. Although some other thermal software requires the entering of all signal layers, sometimes the input information form ECAD could be incomplete. This requires users to spend significant time to set parameters manually but, actually, does not enhance the accuracy. This is an un-necessary requirement.