LED based lighting is now a very hot topic (believe me, in electronic thermal management circles that used to be funny, the first few times). Control of packaged IC junction temperatures will always have a bearing on reliability but for LEDs thermal also effects functional performance in terms of brightness and colour. The hotter they get, the dimmer they appear. A particular … [Read more...]

My colleague Ed and I were marvelling the other day at the CPU cooling unit from one of our training desktop PCs undergoing a repair. "What, all that just for that!?". The CPU itself was but a small square wafer compared to the behemoth that was the ducted fan and heatsink with integral heatpipes mounted on top of it. Whereas transistor sizes are measured in nanometres cooling … [Read more...]

What do you call someone who doesn't believe in Father Christmas? A rebel without a Claus. Right, that's that out of the way. This week Facebook announced that it plans to build a 3x 300,000 ft^2 data centers in Lulea, Sweden. The Lulea business agency who helped attract Facebook to their city are dutifully excited as should Facebook be as they look set to capitalise on 10 … [Read more...]

'Rubbish In -> Rubbish Out' is a well accepted fact in the world of simulation. Regardless of the technical capabilities of your thermal simulation tool, the accuracy of prediction will always be tightly coupled to the accuracy of the input data. The most accurate thermal  IC package model is a so called 'detailed' model where all the internal construction is represented … [Read more...]

It would only have cost me an extra £170, a small extra compared to the cost of the rest of the build, but I decided against laying thermal insulation boards directly under the underfloor electric heating mats. Surely better to leak some of the heat down to heat the 100mm thick concrete screed which would maintain its heat through those cold winter weeks, giving thermal support … [Read more...]