Author Archive for John Parry

technical brief: thermal bottlenecks and shortcut opportunities; innovations in electronics thermal design simulation

September 13th, 2010

Introduction Cooling an electronics system involves transferring heat from various heat sources to the outside ambient. Thermal simulation software provides practitioners with predictions of the temperature and heat flux distributions in and around the system,…read more

Lies, Damned Lies, and “CFD Comparison Charts” – Part II

August 12th, 2010

In my last post I pointed out a very obvious mistake in Blue Ridge Numerics’ “CFD Comparison Chart” of March 19th this year, which incorrectly stated that FloEFD can only handle incompressible sub-sonic flows.
The reason I highlighted this as the most obvious mistake in the “CFD Comparison Chart” is that FloEFD can trace its history [...]

Mechanical Analysis Products Now in Mentor’s Higher Education Program

July 19th, 2010

If you’re involved in CFD in education in any way this will be of interest to you. Since shortly after Flomerics were acquired by Mentor Graphics we’ve been working towards getting out products into Mentor’s Higher Education Program (HEP), and we’ve finally got it done.
To my knowledge, the availability of potentially millions of dollars worth [...]

Sony Vaio laptop in mass ‘recall’

July 1st, 2010

“Authorities in the US have instructed Sony to conduct a recall of its Vaio laptops, after problems with overheating were reported.” started this article on the BBC’s web site.
There is a saying, ” the news is never as good or as bad as it is first reported”. And so it is with this story. It’s not [...]

Nearly Back to Business as Usual

June 4th, 2010

I’ve not posted for a while, which is rather remiss of me. I underestimated the response we would get to our Heatsink 201 webinar, which I gather was our most popular ever, and the number of questions that people would ask. I had around 120 questions, which after removing duplicates and those to do with [...]

The Debate about Liquid Cooled Data Centers

April 19th, 2010

I’ve been remiss in not posting for a couple of weeks, so I’m trying to get back in the saddle. I’ve been working on other things that have taken up a fair bit of time. One is a web seminar on heatsinks – Heatsink 201 – Even More about Heat Sinks which follows on from [...]

MicReD Technology Wins Highest Technical Honor

April 1st, 2010

It was great to read that Dr. Vladimír Székely, has received the Dennis Gabor Award for Innovation for his work leading the team at MicReD on the development of the T3Ster (pronounced “trister”) technology. Congratulations Vladimír, it is richly deserved.
The Dennis Gabor (original Hungarian: Dénes Gábor) Award is Hungary’s highest technical honor, named after the [...]

Sticking Plaster and Light beats Skin Cancer

March 24th, 2010

Thermal management of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) is an important application for CFD software, which is helping designers use LEDs for high-power lighting applications. However, LEDs are changing our lives in so many more ways than simply providing more energy efficient or more aesthetic lighting solutions.
Last year I posted about a light therapy device that [...]

IBM Work to take Moore’s Law to 2025

March 20th, 2010

It was very interesting to read this article about the work IBM are undertaking together with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) on a 3D stacked architecture for multiple cores. The four year collaborative project, called CMOSAIC, promises to deliver an interconnection density from 100 to [...]

Roundup of SEMI-THERM, FloTHERM IC launch and JEDEC

March 9th, 2010

I’m just back from a very productive SEMI-THERM Conference where we launched our new FloTHERM IC product. We had meetings with the editors of 5 leading electronics magazines to coincide with the launch, which was made at our vendor presentation during the exhibition at the start of Tuesday afternoon. Well done to all involved! If [...]

NEW ElectronicsCooling Magazine Website

February 19th, 2010

Just a very quick post to alert you to the new ElectronicsCooling Magazine web site.  We’ve updated the look of the site to improve navigation ahead of the relaunch of the printed magazine. Here’s just some of the features of the new site:

New look and feel
Search
Improved Article and Content Navigation by author; category (Calculation Corner, New [...]

Liquid Cooling – Are We There Yet?

February 15th, 2010

Back in June I posted ‘Air – Is it Running Out of Gas?’ and put forward the view that for general computing applications air isn’t running out of gas just yet. There are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that I suspect the general public has concerns about leaks. Most people have passed cars [...]

Foresight and X-Ray Vision or Hindsight and Regret?

February 9th, 2010

I was on a conference call and WebEx yesterday with the NAFEMS CFD Working Group, of which Mentor Graphics is a member. One of the people on the call had a lot of background noise on his phone, which turned out to be a due to a fan by his desk to keep his computer [...]

FREE Exhibition at SEMI-THERM, Santa Clara February 23-24

February 3rd, 2010

I’m off to SEMI-THERM later this month. SEMI-THERM is one of the premier thermal management conferences and has the best exhibition by far.
The conference runs from 21-25 February, the first two days of which are devoted to professional short courses delivered by a number of leading names in electronics cooling, and past recipients of the [...]