Introduction and Summary In today's competitive environment, the electronics industry is focusing onbusiness process re-engineering or product improvements with emphasis ondevelopment and manufacturing intervals and costs, warranty costs, fieldreliability, and customer maintenance costs. Some of the improvement methodsused are cross-functional teams, concurrent engineering, … [Read more...]
Why the traditional reliability prediction models do not work – is there an alternative?
Introduction While it is generally believed that reliability prediction methods should beused to aid product design and product development, the integrity andauditability of the traditional prediction methods have been found to bequestionable, in that the models do not predict field failures, cannot be usedfor comparative purposes, and present misleading trends and relations. … [Read more...]
Applying computational fluid dynamics to heat sink design and selection
Abstract This article describes how Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can help inthe selection and/or design of a heat sink for electronics cooling applications.CFD modeling complements the other tools in the thermal tool kit: calculationsbased on approximations and correlations; and experimental work. Whether theapplication includes single or multiple heat sinks, the … [Read more...]
DELPHI – A status report on the European -union funded project for the creation and validation of thermal models on electronic parts
The accurate prediction of the operating temperatures of critical electronicparts at the component-, board- and system-level is seriously hampered by thelack of reliable, standardised input data. The DELPHI project is addressing thisproblem by the development and experimental validation of thermal models of avariety of `generic' electronic parts. DELPHI (which stands for … [Read more...]
Fan cooled enclosure analysis using a first order method
Introduction Most Electronics Packaging Engineers and Analysis Specialists have access toa wide range of high quality analysis tools. While a few computer programs useanalytical methods, the majority are based on numerical analysis techniques.Although these programs are becoming easier to use, they typically requireconsiderable skill, and they are certainly capable of producing … [Read more...]