Alpha’s series of heat sinks feature an innovative attachment mechanism. Electronic components have become faster and more compact, generating more heat and increasing thermal densities. This has led to the use of heat sinks of increased size and mass. One of the biggest challenges for thermal/mechanical engineers is mechanically mounting larger heat sinks while minimizing the … [Read more...]
Modeling Heat Conduction in Printed Circuit Boards Using Finite Element Analysis
Introduction Heat transfer in and around a printed circuit board (PCB) is generally very complex. Some of the heat generated in components is conducted away through the multiple conducting (trace) layers, vias, and dielectric layers of the board; and some is dissipated by convection and radiation from the exposed surfaces. There has long been a focus on characterizing the … [Read more...]
Characterizing a package on a populated printed circuit board
This column has emphasized methods of analyzing packages in the JEDEC-standard test environment. A thermal metric that lends itself to analyses of system applications is the junction-to-board thermal characterization parameter, JB. If one knows the board temperature (TB), then the junction temperature (TJ) can be determined by a simple application of the following formula: TJ … [Read more...]
Parameters affecting package thermal performance a low end system level example
Thermal management of electronic equipment is a dynamic process. For example, the anticipated power trends for CMOS technology can be found in the roadmaps of [1 and 2]. They closely follow the rapidly rising power trends seen in the 1980s for the bi-polar circuits [3] but with a time shift by a decade. It is a fortunate circumstance that a tremendous amount of heat transfer … [Read more...]
Visualization of air flows in electronics systems
The three-dimensional shape and irregular nature of electronic component topologies on air-cooled Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) give rise to complex air flow patterns that have been well documented [1]. Even laminar flows over relatively simple shapes, such as cubical metal blocks simulating electronic components, often exhibit multi-dimensional flow phenomena that include … [Read more...]
