AS PROMISED IN MY editorial of the 2011 Fall issue, I will devote this issue’s column on the topic of heat spreading. The reason is that I, while writing a white paper on basic thermal management for LED applications, found some unexpected facts pointing at problems of interpretation of heat spreading data for dual layers when using the often-used heat spreading equations. In … [Read more...]
Heat Spreading Calculations Using Thermal Circuit Elements
Heat Spreading Calculations Using Thermal Circuit Elements Bruce Guenin, Associate Technical Editor Introduction In electronics cooling applications, there are numerous changes of scale from the chip level to the system level. This is characteristic of the signaling, power, and thermal infrastructures in electronic systems. Because of this, it is inevitable that the heat flow … [Read more...]
Heat Spreading: Not a Trivial Problem
Introduction Heat spreading is essentially area enlarging: the larger the area, the more heat can be removed at the same temperature difference (subject to certain limits). Unfortunately, except for the simplest of cases, the equations describing heat spreading physics do not have an explicit mathematical solution. Hence, we have to rely on clever approximations or suitable … [Read more...]
Exploring the Limits of Air Cooling
Introduction Heat from electronic devices is an integral part of information processing, not a nuisance that can someday be eliminated. This is a physical principle that is independent of the device of information processing. However, when viewed in the historical perspective, the severity of heat problems has not monotonically increased. It came to the fore some time ago, … [Read more...]
