Historically, the cost of energy and the cost of the data center power and cooling infrastructure have not been on the radar for most Chief Financial Officers (CFO) and Chief Information Officers (CIO) and have not been considered in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) models. As a result, almost all of the focus has been on driving down the cost of IT equipment in the data center. … [Read more...]
Effective Thermal Design for Electronic Systems
In the past, the thermal designer's role was seen as one of predicting temperatures and ensuring that reliability limits are met for products. However, the role of an effective thermal designer is much more than that. We believe that thermal designers are both critical and most useful in the early conceptual stages of product design. This is where they provide the most "bang … [Read more...]
Improving productivity in electronic packaging with flow network modeling (fnm)
As the complexity and power density of electronics systems increase, so too does the demand for tools to improve both product quality and designer productivity. This is especially true for thermal designers who use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools for thermal designs. Several important factors are driving this trend: System complexity has increased to the point that … [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...]
