Engineers are generally hard-nosed realists and don’t rely on the mythical kingdoms of fairy tales where only good things can happen and all problems disappear. Still, there is one magical place which is often called out when dealing with the thermal aspects of design, and it has the simple name of “away.” How so? Cooling devices and techniques – including heat sinks, heat … [Read more...]

When you’re planning how to solve the ongoing problem of keeping things cool enough, it’s easy to mentally blur the lines between hot components and hot boxes. The difficulty is that the solution for one of these may not be adequate or appropriate for the other.   Here’s the situation: in most systems, the heat sources are not distributed uniformly across the circuit board … [Read more...]