Introduction Microprocessor and system thermal management are linked to facility cooling: power dissipation and cooling techniques employed at one end of the size scale have cascading impacts at the other extreme (Figure 1). For example, ineffective airflow distribution or insufficient underfloor static pressure in a data center can reduce the supply airflow rate from … [Read more...]
Solve Thermal Issues Earlier in Updated Board Designs
Introduction Often new products or product concepts only introduce some new aspects and rely heavily on existing designs. At the board level this often means only one section of a board is retooled or upgraded; an approach that can save significant time and money. Unfortunately, we cannot rely solely on previous work because the interaction of old functions and new features … [Read more...]
Critical Cooling Issues in High Power Radio Frequency Transmitter Amplifiers
Introduction While emerging methodologies correctly insist that thermal engineers should be involved right from the early conceptual stages of electronics product design [1], many situations still require thermal analysis well after the introduction of the product to its intended application. Military transmitters installed in the 1980's and 1990's and still in operation today … [Read more...]
Numerical Modeling and Experimental Verification of High-density Servers
High-density hardware and software are developed as part of an initiative to greatly increase data center compute densities. Concept systems presented here are based on the Intel® Itanium™ processor family and are designed for a 1U rack-mount form factor. The current dual-processor system concept is targeted at the front-end server market (e.g., web hosting and mail routing), … [Read more...]