Two different package styles, two very different thermal responses when a extruded plate fin heatsink is placed on each. At the very least a FloTHERM simulation can be used to observe the thermal behaviour of…read more
Why Not Just Shove a Heatsink on Top of it? Part 1
May 13th, 2013
A common enough question. Heatsinks are often perceived to be the magic answer to all electronics cooling challenges. They should be called ‘area extenders’ as heat does not just disappear into them. Heat spreads throughout…read more
Experiment vs. Simulation, Part 5: Detailed IC Package Model Calibration Methodology
April 19th, 2013
In the royal family of thermal IC package modelling types, a detailed model is King. All critical 3D geometry is modelled explicitly, no abstraction into a thermal resistor equivalent model, no hiding all the proprietary…read more
CFD – Colourful Friday Distractions
April 8th, 2013
By way of an apology for the more verbose blogs I’ve been issuing recently I’d like to present you with a blog that serves no other purpose than to show a pretty picture. CFD as…read more
Experiment vs. Simulation, Part 3: JESD51-14
February 22nd, 2013
The JESD51-14 standard was published in November 2010, prepared by the JEDEC JC-15 Committee on Thermal Characterization. It outlines a new process to measure what is the most common IC package thermal metric, Theta_jc. This…read more
Experiment vs. Simulation, Part 1: Them and Us.
January 18th, 2013
Before you sell it, or commission it, you want to be sure that it works. Monies have been spent on getting things this far, some of it on you via your overhead and your expansive…read more
A Little Goes A Long Way (But A Lot Doesn’t Go Much Further)
May 3rd, 2012
It has been almost 3 years since I started this blog and I hope you’ve found it as interesting as I have cathartic. Although I’m not as yet bereft of topic ideas, I thought this…read more
Simulation Software So Simple Even Teenagers Can Use It
April 4th, 2012
The UK government has a policy for all year 10 or year 11 students to undertake a week’s work experience. Last week we welcomed a 15 year old student to the Mentor office where the…read more
Bottlenecks and Interface Materials; Part 3 – Relieving Thermal Bottlenecks Reduce Temperatures
February 10th, 2012
As with all good inventions, you quickly wonder how on earth you could have done without them before. Relieving thermal bottlenecks reduce temperatures; it’s so blindingly obvious. Now that we have the ability to visualise…read more
Bottlenecks and Interface Materials; Part 2 – When TIMs Go Bad
January 30th, 2012
‘Bits stuck onto other bits’, a succinct definition of an electronic product, if not a product that contains electronics. Soldering is the method of choice for getting the components to attach to the pcb, the…read more
Bottlenecks and Interface Materials; Part 1 – Great Thermal Bedfellows
January 18th, 2012
Probably due to the beer fridge, I now seem to be becoming the repository of broken electronic products with an expectation that the cause of their demise can be identified, retrospectively, using thermal simulation. This…read more
LEDs; The future’s bright and hot.
January 3rd, 2012
LED based lighting is now a very hot topic (believe me, in electronic thermal management circles that used to be funny, the first few times). Control of packaged IC junction temperatures will always have a…read more
What! All that just for that? The bonkers world of CPU cooling.
November 17th, 2011
My colleague Ed and I were marvelling the other day at the CPU cooling unit from one of our training desktop PCs undergoing a repair. “What, all that just for that!?”. The CPU itself was…read more
Ho, Ho, Ho! Facebook moves to Lapland
October 28th, 2011
What do you call someone who doesn’t believe in Father Christmas? A rebel without a Claus. Right, that’s that out of the way. This week Facebook announced that it plans to build a 3x 300,000…read more
Recent Posts
- Thermal Spreading and More Using Open-Source FEA Software
- Two-Phase Flow Control of On-Chip Two-Phase Cooling Systems Developed for Blade Servers of Data Centers
- Thermal Facts and Fairy Tales: A System Perspective for Electronics Cooling
- Electronic Performance Impact of Elevated Humidity Environments — Implications for Free Air Cooling of Data Centers
- Epoxy Meets UL94V-0 Specifications
- Why Not Just Shove a Heatsink on Top of it? Part 2: Heat Flow Budgets
- New PWM Version of Fan Released
- Revisions for CPU Coolers for Intel Xeon
Latest Issue
Don’t miss out on
the March 2013 issue
of Electronics Cooling, which includes feature articles on the Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Two-Phase Cooling Technologies in Military platforms, Measured Thermal Resistance of Microbumps in 3D Chip Stack, and more.
View Issue »
Popular Posts
- The Seebeck Coefficient 3 comment(s)
- Simplified Formula for Estimating Natural Convection Heat Transfer Coefficient on a Flat Plate 2 comment(s)
- The Thermal Conductivity of Moist Air 5 comment(s)
- Advances In High-Performance Cooling For Electronics 11 comment(s)
- Heat pipes for electronics cooling applications 8 comment(s)
- Notes on Using Thermocouples 11 comment(s)
- Estimating Parallel Plate-Fin Heat Sink Thermal Resistance 18 comment(s)
- Thermal Conductivity of Solders 2 comment(s)
