Thermal design engineers working in defense electronics are facing many challenges, some of which have been around for a long time and some that are more recent. Worldwide climatic extreme temperatures are reasonably constant and there are many military electronic systems that function in these extremes. As a result, there is significant design history available for … [Read more...]
Thermal Design Challenges in Automotive Alternator Power Electronics
Ever since the advent of the automotive alternator, or claw-pole alternating current generator, in the 1960's, there has been an ever-increasing thermal design challenge to cool the power electronics in these machines. Figure 1 depicts a typical cutaway section of a modern day alternator. At first glance one may think that cooling the diodes in a rectifier bridge of an … [Read more...]
Diamonds are a Thermal Designer's Best Friends
Different forms of carbon, such as processed natural graphite, pyrolytic graphite, diamond-like carbon, and synthetic diamond, offer lots of possibilities for maximizing conductive heat transfer.Synthetic diamond has already found its place as a common solution for heat spreaders inside semiconductor laser components, where temperature stabilization is of utmost importance for … [Read more...]
The increasing importance of thermal test dies
Thermal test dies are among the major tools used in package thermal design qualification. They are usually simple chips, containing heaters and temperature sensors. The sensors measure the temperature on the chip surface as a result of the steady state powering or the time dependence of the temperature increase or decrease in case of transient qualification. From these data, … [Read more...]
Ten stupid things engineers do to mess up their cooling
Editor's Note: On the eve of the new millenium, the editors of ElectronicsCooling have decided to depart from our normal serious tone just this once, unless, of course, we can convince Tony to contribute another story or two for us sometime [soon!] in the next thousand years. Herewith, for your amusement and edification is a humorous, yet insightful, retrospective of famous - … [Read more...]
