Introduction Despite the slowdown in the communication industry, Internet traffic continues to grow rapidly, fueled by the explosion in data communications, mobile Internet, e-commerce, content rich applications, and multi-media services. Internet traffic has increased by approximately 80% yearly in each of the last three years, and will continue to grow at 60 - 80% annually … [Read more...]
Critical Cooling Issues in High Power Radio Frequency Transmitter Amplifiers
Introduction While emerging methodologies correctly insist that thermal engineers should be involved right from the early conceptual stages of electronics product design [1], many situations still require thermal analysis well after the introduction of the product to its intended application. Military transmitters installed in the 1980's and 1990's and still in operation today … [Read more...]
A Few Design Techniques On How To Reduce The Power
There will always be the need to get heat out of high power circuitry, but with a little extra design effort up front, we may be able to reduce overall power needs. Here are two techniques that can help do that. Turn Idle Circuits Off A circuit that is not always used can be turned off until needed. This is a technique widely used in battery powered electronics, but it can be … [Read more...]
Numerical Modeling and Experimental Verification of High-density Servers
High-density hardware and software are developed as part of an initiative to greatly increase data center compute densities. Concept systems presented here are based on the Intel® Itanium™ processor family and are designed for a 1U rack-mount form factor. The current dual-processor system concept is targeted at the front-end server market (e.g., web hosting and mail routing), … [Read more...]
Thermal Design Challenges in Automotive Alternator Power Electronics
Ever since the advent of the automotive alternator, or claw-pole alternating current generator, in the 1960's, there has been an ever-increasing thermal design challenge to cool the power electronics in these machines. Figure 1 depicts a typical cutaway section of a modern day alternator. At first glance one may think that cooling the diodes in a rectifier bridge of an … [Read more...]
