There are 475,000 Google search hits for ‘thermal bottleneck’. It’s a well-recognized phrase playing on a very obvious analogy. Despite this, there were few attempts to quantify such a parameter. Spurred on by its relevance in electronic thermal design, we did just that, put hard numbers to the concept. FloTHERM now has the ability to plot distributions of a thermal … [Read more...]
Archives for October 2014
Blue LEDs. Since When is Improvement Invention?
Lighting accounts for ~20% of the world’s total energy consumption. This is a staggering statistic. Why so much? Historically a lot of energy had to be consumed to produce the required amount of visible light. Incandescent bulbs, where electric current is used to heat a metal filament, resulted in most of the energy being dissipated as heat. More a hot bulb than a … [Read more...]
The Electronics Cooling Metaphorical Drinking Game
There are a handful of quoted and re-quoted drivers, concepts and technologies in the electronics cooling industry. Be it a presentation, peer-reviewed paper, press release, thermal design guide or webinar the same core material keeps popping up in various guises. This is by no means a bad thing. The challenges faced when cooling electronics are clear, clearly … [Read more...]