A lot of engineering involves the management of energies, converting them from one form to another, channeling off useful work to power our cars, planes, phones, lights, etc. To date, we haven’t come up with a system to channel all energy into the desired task. Even the most advanced power generation systems still end up heating water to steam to drive turbines, a cycle … [Read more...]
Thermal Bottlenecks. This is Hot. This is Why.
There are 475,000 Google search hits for ‘thermal bottleneck’. It’s a well-recognized phrase playing on a very obvious analogy. Despite this, there were few attempts to quantify such a parameter. Spurred on by its relevance in electronic thermal design, we did just that, put hard numbers to the concept. FloTHERM now has the ability to plot distributions of a thermal … [Read more...]
Blue LEDs. Since When is Improvement Invention?
Lighting accounts for ~20% of the world’s total energy consumption. This is a staggering statistic. Why so much? Historically a lot of energy had to be consumed to produce the required amount of visible light. Incandescent bulbs, where electric current is used to heat a metal filament, resulted in most of the energy being dissipated as heat. More a hot bulb than a … [Read more...]
The Electronics Cooling Metaphorical Drinking Game
There are a handful of quoted and re-quoted drivers, concepts and technologies in the electronics cooling industry. Be it a presentation, peer-reviewed paper, press release, thermal design guide or webinar the same core material keeps popping up in various guises. This is by no means a bad thing. The challenges faced when cooling electronics are clear, clearly … [Read more...]
Xilinx Patent for Critical TJ Prediction
A recently issued patent describes a process by which the critical IC temperature (junction temperature, Tj) can be determined in an end-user environment. A critical junction temperature is one that, should the IC temperature go beyond it, will continue to increase in a thermal runaway scenario. In other words, the environment in which the IC is operating can’t get the … [Read more...]
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