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...]

Microelectronics and microsystems play a vital and increasingly important role in current and future human life and society. The future will bring a plethora of new products/processes based on new concepts with limited past experience to build upon. Much of the research of microstructures involves thermal management in one way or another, such as in relation to the biochemistry … [Read more...]

The first article in this series on spreadsheet based thermal resistance network analysis [1] described a procedure for using Microsoft Excel to solve a thermal resistance network by applying matrix analysis. That article assumed that the values of the thermal resistances between nodes were both known and fixed. This article presents methods for simplifying the process of … [Read more...]