embodiments of systems and methods for improved measurement of transient thermal responses in electronic systems are described herein . embodiments of the disclosure use the known thermal transfer function of an electronic system to generate an equivalent resistor - capacitor network having a dynamic response that is identical to a given power excitation as the actual electronic system would have to that power excitation . using the analogy between thermal and electrical systems , a foster rc network is constructed , comprising a plurality of rc stages in which resistors and capacitors are connected in parallel . subsequently , the analog thermal rc network is converted into an infinite impulse response digital filter , whose coefficients can be obtained the z - transform of the analog thermal rc network . this iir digital filter establishes the recursive relationship between temperature output at the current time step and measured power input at the previous time step . using this iir digital filter , temperature response subject to arbitrary time - dependent power can be calculated in very small amount of time compared with prior art methods .