Design

Thermal Facts & Fairy Tales: Heat Spreading Revisited

March 13th, 2012

AS PROMISED IN MY editorial of the 2011 Fall issue, I will devote this issue’s column on the topic of heat spreading. The reason is that I, while writing a white paper on basic thermal…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

Has Your Brand Image Been Hijacked?

January 25th, 2012

Electronics Cooling Business Bulletin Volume 6 | January 2012 In a recent article entitled “Who is Managing Your Brand Image?” my colleague, Graham Kilshaw, explained how customer behavior has effected a significant shift in marketing,…read more

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Bridging the Simulation Supply Chain; NXP Semiconductors, a Case in Point

January 22nd, 2012

By far and away the most common enquiry by someone using FloTHERM, especially at the start of their adoption, is “How do I model my components?”. This is hardly surprising as the mainstay of electronics…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

Emails, more Emails and Jeff Bridges

January 9th, 2012

It’s estimated that, from a figure of 0.4% in 1995, now about 30% of the world’s population are ‘internet users’. Not sure exactly what being a ‘user’ entails; looking at a web page? clicking a…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

ElectronicsCooling December 2011 Issue

December 1st, 2011

Don’t miss out on the December 2011 issue of ElectronicsCooling, which includes feature articles on data center design, electro-thermal simulation of power, energy reduction and performance maximization as well as technical briefs. If you would…read more

Thermal Management Technologies: a $10.9 Billion Market by 2016

November 29th, 2011

ElectronicsCooling Business Bulletin Volume 5 | December 2011 According to a recent study by BBC Research, the global market for thermal management products, which currently stands at approximately $8 billion, is expected to grow over…read more

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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

All Detailed Thermal IC Package Models are Wrong… Probably

October 20th, 2011

‘Rubbish In -> Rubbish Out’ is a well accepted fact in the world of simulation. Regardless of the technical capabilities of your thermal simulation tool, the accuracy of prediction will always be tightly coupled to…read more

Underfloor Electric Heating. Part III – Penny wise, pound foolish.

October 18th, 2011

It would only have cost me an extra £170, a small extra compared to the cost of the rest of the build, but I decided against laying thermal insulation boards directly under the underfloor electric…read more