Introduction With thermal solutions becoming more challenging, there is a push for novel cooling ideas or materials to further mitigate thermal issues facing today's electronics. In these design situations, the proven method of analytical calculations, modeling, and laboratory testing is sometimes bypassed in the search for a quick "cure-all" solution. Evolutionary progress is … [Read more...]
Critical Cooling Issues in High Power Radio Frequency Transmitter Amplifiers
Introduction While emerging methodologies correctly insist that thermal engineers should be involved right from the early conceptual stages of electronics product design [1], many situations still require thermal analysis well after the introduction of the product to its intended application. Military transmitters installed in the 1980's and 1990's and still in operation today … [Read more...]
A Few Design Techniques On How To Reduce The Power
There will always be the need to get heat out of high power circuitry, but with a little extra design effort up front, we may be able to reduce overall power needs. Here are two techniques that can help do that. Turn Idle Circuits Off A circuit that is not always used can be turned off until needed. This is a technique widely used in battery powered electronics, but it can be … [Read more...]
Challenges In Thermal Control Of Military Electronics Systems
Thermal design engineers working in defense electronics are facing many challenges, some of which have been around for a long time and some that are more recent. Worldwide climatic extreme temperatures are reasonably constant and there are many military electronic systems that function in these extremes. As a result, there is significant design history available for … [Read more...]
Packaging And Temperature Control Considerations For Planar Waveguide Circuits
Optical Networking The all-optical network has been emerging as a solution to provide higher bandwidth, lower cost systems for handling high capacity network traffic. Due to the inherent limits of copper wire and the high cost-per-bit of electrical systems, service providers will replace electrical components with fiber optic counterparts wherever possible as the cost of the … [Read more...]