Introduction With the increase in power density resulting from advancements insemiconductor packaging technologies comes the issue of heat dissipation. Heatis generated as a result of electrical energy being converted to thermal energyduring circuit activities. The junction temperature of a chip directly affectsthe performance of the circuits and the reliability of … [Read more...]
Environmental stress testing – a product improvement method
Introduction and Summary In today's competitive environment, the electronics industry is focusing onbusiness process re-engineering or product improvements with emphasis ondevelopment and manufacturing intervals and costs, warranty costs, fieldreliability, and customer maintenance costs. Some of the improvement methodsused are cross-functional teams, concurrent engineering, … [Read more...]
Why the traditional reliability prediction models do not work – is there an alternative?
Introduction While it is generally believed that reliability prediction methods should beused to aid product design and product development, the integrity andauditability of the traditional prediction methods have been found to bequestionable, in that the models do not predict field failures, cannot be usedfor comparative purposes, and present misleading trends and relations. … [Read more...]
Making surface temperature measurements using liquid crystal thermography
Introduction The development of liquid crystal (LC) based thermography overthe past 30 years has provided thermal engineers with a relatively inexpensivetechnique for visualizing and measuring surface temperature. Engineers andscientists have successfully used LC thermography to investigate various thermalphenomena in a wide variety of applications. These applications … [Read more...]
Specifying filters for forced convection cooling
Introduction The importance and utility of air filters is often underestimated since itis typically an after-thought in the design cycle. The wrong filter is oftenused for an application which may compromise the electrical and thermalperformance of the system as a result of contaminant build-up. In this article,different filter designs and the selection process is reviewed to … [Read more...]
