In the majority of applications involving plastic surface-mount packages, most of the heat generated by integrated circuits will flow to the printed circuit board (PCB) by way of the package leads and then to In higher-power applications it is often necessary to attach a heat sink to the top of the package to keep the junction temperature of the chip within specified limits. … [Read more...]
Thermal design of fault tolerant and high availability computer systems
Thermal Design is one of the most challenging aspects of computer system design. This is definitely the case when it comes to designing for “fault tolerance” and “high availability” in high-speed multiprocessor-based systems. The inherent challenges associated with fault tolerance not only bring demanding design requirements but headaches as well. The term fault tolerance … [Read more...]
Determining the junction temperature in a plastic semiconductor package, part 1
One of the primary tasks of the thermal engineer is to determine the temperature of the junction (active circuitry on an integrated circuit) for the various packages in a system. Measurements performed in the industry-standard test environment are often used in this endeavor. The most common thermal metric [1,2] is the junction-to-air thermal resistance, JA (pronounced theta, … [Read more...]
Thermal characterization of active components
In the European project SEED (Supplier Evaluation and Exploitation of DELPHI), the methods for thermal characterization of active components developed in the predecessor DELPHI (Development of Libraries of PHysical models for an Integrated design environment) were evaluated by component suppliers. The methods were improved for practical application and extended to a large … [Read more...]
Acoustic noise emission and communication systems in the next century
Acoustic noise emission is one of several physical design issues addressed during the design of telecommunications and information technology equipment. In most systems, noise is a by-product of the air-movers used for system cooling. The amount of heat dissipated in electronic systems cooled by forced convection is directly proportional to volumetric flow rate. The flow rate, … [Read more...]
