Examples of state-of-the-art thermal management solutions at the dawn of the 21st century (left to right): a TCM module, a high-density heat sink, and an ultra performance, low profile fan-sink. Thermal management has served as a key enabling technology in the development of advanced microelectronic systems and has facilitated many of the "Moore's Law" [Moore, G.E., 1975] … [Read more...]
The history of power dissipation
Figure 1. Transistor counts on Intel processors from inception to present superimposed on Moore's prediction. In his fascinating book, "Visions," Michio Kaku [1] predicts a future driven by silicon and quantum computers. Based on the information we have today, it is intriguing to speculate how such a highly silicon-based society might function and evolve. Being a thermal … [Read more...]
Determining the junction temperature in a plastic semiconductor package, part II
In the majority of applications involving plastic surface-mount packages, most of the heat generated by integrated circuits will flow to the printed circuit board (PCB) by way of the package leads and then to In higher-power applications it is often necessary to attach a heat sink to the top of the package to keep the junction temperature of the chip within specified limits. … [Read more...]
Thermal design of fault tolerant and high availability computer systems
Thermal Design is one of the most challenging aspects of computer system design. This is definitely the case when it comes to designing for “fault tolerance” and “high availability” in high-speed multiprocessor-based systems. The inherent challenges associated with fault tolerance not only bring demanding design requirements but headaches as well. The term fault tolerance … [Read more...]
Determining the junction temperature in a plastic semiconductor package, part 1
One of the primary tasks of the thermal engineer is to determine the temperature of the junction (active circuitry on an integrated circuit) for the various packages in a system. Measurements performed in the industry-standard test environment are often used in this endeavor. The most common thermal metric [1,2] is the junction-to-air thermal resistance, JA (pronounced theta, … [Read more...]
