Introduction Mobile computing is poised to shape the way we live our lives, allowing people to generate, retrieve, and process data anywhere and at any time. The infrastructure for mobile computing is rapidly developing, as evidenced by the recent growth of cellular phone networks and a constant stream of innovations in portable electronic equipment. Mobile computing is also … [Read more...]
Forced convection cooling inside an electronics enclosure
Introduction One of the more complex thermal problems in electronics is the modeling of complete systems, such as an enclosure containing electronic components. A typical example would be a power supply, including heat sinks and a cooling fan. This problem becomes more difficult when there are multiple heat sinks and other large components arranged in an arbitrary manner inside … [Read more...]
Interaction of the system and module-level thermal phenomena- a flip-chip/BGA example
Fig. 1: Levels in a computer environment. Introduction Increasing demands for higher performance in microprocessors have a direct effect on chip power and heat generation. Increased function and miniaturization of the packages result in thermal challenges that require a thorough understanding of the system's thermal performance under all possible field conditions. Regardless … [Read more...]
Calculating Spreading Resistance in Heat Sinks
Accident? Consider the scenario where a designer wishes to incorporate a newly developed device into a system and soon learns that a heat sink is needed to cool the device. The designer finds a rather large heat sink in a catalog which marginally satisfies the required thermal criteria. Due to other considerations, such as fan noise and cost constraints, an attempt to use a … [Read more...]
Standardizing heat sink characterization for forced convection
Figure 1. Wind tunnel configuration Introduction While there has been a flurry of activity inliterature addressing the behavior of heat sinks in computer electronics,the reusability of the data presented in these papers has been somewhatlimited for two reasons: 1) The data presented is application specific. 2) There has never been a standard method for characterizing … [Read more...]
