INTRODUCTION Traditionally, medical science has depended on a variety of diagnostic tests administered by medical personnel to either detect the onset of an illness or to monitor its progress. More recently, this focus has been supplemented by a strategy of health maintenance and disease prevention. Both of these strategies benefit from the frequent testing of individuals. Of … [Read more...]
Transient Thermal Calculations for Skin Contact by Wearable Devices
Introduction Mobile and wearable electronic devices are truly ubiquitous these days. Thermal engineers involved in the design of these devices are not only attentive to managing the temperature of the various components within these devices, but they are also careful to ensure that the temperature on the outer shell of these devices never exceeds certain limits as specified in … [Read more...]
Thermal Interactions between High-power Packages and Heat Sinks, Part 2
Calculation Corner Bruce Guenin, Assoc. Technical Editor Introduction These days, many thermal engineers face the challenge of defining effective heat sink cooling solutions for high power processors and ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). The usual practice would be to calculate a value of ΘJA (junction-to-air thermal resistance) for the … [Read more...]
The Junction-to-Case Thermal Resistance: A One-Dimensional Underachiever in a Three-dimensional, Conjugate Heat Transfer World
INTRODUCTION As integrated circuits were becoming more widespread in the 1980’s, most of the developmental problems had to do the with electrical operation of the devices and not so much on cooling them, due to low power levels. It was the electrical engineers who did the functional testing, an activity that ultimately expanded to include thermal testing. Even the thermal … [Read more...]
Use of the Monte Carlo Method in Packaging Thermal Calculations
INTRODUCTION The state of the art in performing thermal calculations in our industry is very advanced. However, how applicable the results of a calculation are to the real-world performance of a packaging or an active cooling component depends on the quality of the data characterizing these various components. In the real world of manufacturing, such characterization … [Read more...]
