The current millennium has been marked by great change in so many areas — political, economic, cultural, technological, climatic ... and the list goes on. I, as I’m sure many of you, often look for things that persist in a familiar form despite the flux of events that surround us. We often can count on our personal relationships within families, friends, and communities to help … [Read more...]

Simulation of temperature fields in electronics is a frequent task for thermal design engineers. Depending on the need and available time, the simulation used to predict temperatures may range from hand calculations to full physics-based numerical simulations. Accurate thermal simulations are always desired but in most instances, even assessing the accuracy level within a … [Read more...]

For almost 10 years now, the increasing heat loads in data centers have been recognized as a growing problem [1]. One of the approaches that has been effective in attacking this problem is the introduction of a water-cooled heat exchanger at the rear of a rack [2-5]. Using this approach, a part or nearly all the heat load absorbed by air passing over the heat dissipating … [Read more...]

Expansion-matching materials development for semiconductor packaging has traditionally focused on ceramic, organic, metallic and composite materials used for packaging of silicon die for a broad variety of applications in many types of equipment markets. Market segments where these types of materials are used include integrated circuits, RF devices and components for … [Read more...]

Accurate reliability predictions for outdoor electronic equipment depend on realistic characterizations of ambient operating conditions. However, unlike the relatively constant indoor environmental conditions, outdoor conditions can vary significantly from day to day. Mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) estimates are highly dependent on operating temperature. Therefore, the use of … [Read more...]