Introduction The thermal resistance of a heat sink is a convenient way of describing its performance but, unlike its electrical counterpart, the thermal resistance of a heat sink is not a constant: it changes significantly with air flow. How we "understand" heat sinks is revealed by the models we use to describe their thermal resistance. Most thermal engineers use a single-term … [Read more...]
Advances In High-Performance Cooling For Electronics
Introduction The need for new cooling techniques is driven by the continuing increases in power dissipation of electronic parts and systems. In many instances standard techniques cannot achieve the required cooling performance due to physical limitations in heat transfer capabilities. These limitations are principally related to the limited thermal conductivity of air for … [Read more...]
Cooling Solutions In The Past Decade
Introduction In 1995, a typical thermal design engineer was aware that removing heat was not going to get any easier in the next few years. A look back at the past ten years reveals that thermal management remained a challenging field. Fortunately, developments and improvements in thermal management hardware have assisted the electronics packaging community by enabling higher … [Read more...]
Threatened With a Pipe
I have become a Heel Dragger. When natural convection was all the rage, I was touting fans. Once fan cooling became the status quo, I started dropping hints about heat pipes and thermoelectric coolers. The technology roadmap showed nothing but higher power ahead, and I would soon need those fancier cooling tools. Now everybody senses that this air cooling act is growing stale, … [Read more...]
Low Profile Heat Sink Cooling Technologies for Next Generation CPU Thermal Designs
Introduction The electronic industry requires increased forced-air cooling limits to cool high-end server CPUs adequately. Improving air-cooled heat sink thermal performance is one of the critical areas for increasing the overall air-cooling limit. One of the challenging aspects for improving heat sink performance is the effective utilization of relatively large air-cooled fin … [Read more...]
