Mentor Blogs

It has been almost 3 years since I started this blog and I hope you’ve found it as interesting as I have cathartic. Although I’m not as yet bereft of topic ideas, I thought this would be a good time to solicit a guest blog from industry. It was either that or a Simponsesque montage of previous posts. I covered the highly successful provision of FloTHERM models of power packages from NXP … Read More

NXP, Electronics Cooling, thermal design guide

In 1989 Flomerics was the first organisation to provide application specific CFD based simulation software where all pre and post-processing capabilities were contained within a single WIMP based graphical user interface. That pioneering period involved missionary sales to add simulation to the arsenal of the design engineer, enabling virtual prototyping to be used as a precursor to physical build and … Read More

FloVENT, Electronics Cooling, HVAC, XML

The UK government has a policy for all year 10 or year 11 students to undertake a week’s work experience. Last week we welcomed a 15 year old student to the Mentor office where the FloTHERM and FloVENT software development is done. The student was tasked with simulating the air flow and temperature distribution in the office space using FloVENT. Using our own software to model our own offices … Read More

Electronics Cooling, FloVENT, CFD, HVAC, thermal comfort

As with all good inventions, you quickly wonder how on earth you could have done without them before. Relieving thermal bottlenecks reduce temperatures; it’s so blindingly obvious. Now that we have the ability to visualise with FloTHERM exactly where the thermal bottlenecks are in a design, the job of the (overworked/underpaid) thermal design engineer just got that more productive. Electronic … Read More

Electronics Cooling, bottleneck, thermal bottleneck, thermal chokepoint

‘Bits stuck onto other bits’, a succinct definition of an electronic product, if not a product that contains electronics. Soldering is the method of choice for getting the components to attach to the pcb, the layered board that contains the metallic traces connecting component pins to other component pins. Rivets, welds, screws or bolts for the chassis, some form of gluing or sticky adhesion … Read More

Electronics Cooling, CFD, thermal chokepoint, T3ster, thermal bottleneck

By far and away the most common enquiry by someone using FloTHERM, especially at the start of their adoption, is “How do I model my components?”. This is hardly surprising as the mainstay of electronics thermal management is the control of operating component temperatures (junction and/or case). A virtual prototyping design by simulation approach requires models of components capable of such predictions. … Read More

NXP Semiconductors, Electronics Cooling

Probably due to the beer fridge, I now seem to be becoming the repository of broken electronic products with an expectation that the cause of their demise can be identified, retrospectively, using thermal simulation. This week my good colleague John Parry dumped a rather poorly DVD player on my desk with a ‘go on then’ look. There’s nothing quite like the sight of a scorched PCB to … Read More

bottleneck, Electronics Cooling, beer, thermal interface material, TIM, thermal bottleneck

It’s estimated that, from a figure of 0.4% in 1995, now about 30% of the world’s population are ‘internet users’. Not sure exactly what being a ‘user’ entails; looking at a web page? clicking a link? sending an email? Probably the latter considering how many I receive. The Romans used little wax or wooden tablets, the Victorians introduced a penny-post system, today … Read More

Email, Electronics Cooling, telecoms

LED based lighting is now a very hot topic (believe me, in electronic thermal management circles that used to be funny, the first few times). Control of packaged IC junction temperatures will always have a bearing on reliability but for LEDs thermal also effects functional performance in terms of brightness and colour. The hotter they get, the dimmer they appear. A particular contradiction in the context … Read More

LED, Electronics Cooling, TERALED, LEDs, T3ster

Joseph Fourier led a full and interesting life. Apart from his obvious legacy of Fourier’s Law that relates the temperature difference across a solid to the steady state heat flow through it he was also once governor of lower Egypt and Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. It was with a little more than a passing sense of irony that his belief in wrapping the body up in blankets … Read More

Electronics Cooling, die level thermal analysis, sub-micron scale

My colleague Ed and I were marvelling the other day at the CPU cooling unit from one of our training desktop PCs undergoing a repair. “What, all that just for that!?”. The CPU itself was but a small square wafer compared to the behemoth that was the ducted fan and heatsink with integral heatpipes mounted on top of it. Whereas transistor sizes are measured in nanometres cooling systems can … Read More

CPU cooling, Electronics Cooling, CFD, PC cooling, Heatsink

What do you call someone who doesn’t believe in Father Christmas? A rebel without a Claus. Right, that’s that out of the way. This week Facebook announced that it plans to build a 300,000 ft^2 data center in Lulea, Sweden. The Lulea business agency who helped attract Facebook to their city are dutifully excited as should Facebook be as they look set to capitalise on 10 months each year of … Read More

data center cooling, data centre, Data Center, HVAC, PUE, Electronics Cooling, FloVENT

‘Rubbish In -> Rubbish Out’ is a well accepted fact in the world of simulation. Regardless of the technical capabilities of your thermal simulation tool, the accuracy of prediction will always be tightly coupled to the accuracy of the input data. The most accurate thermal  IC package model is a so called ‘detailed’ model where all the internal construction is represented explicitly … Read More

Electronics Cooling, detailed thermal IC package models, T3ster, FloTHERM PACK, strucutre functions

It would only have cost me an extra £170, a small extra compared to the cost of the rest of the build, but I decided against laying thermal insulation boards directly under the underfloor electric heating mats. Surely better to leak some of the heat down to heat the 100mm thick concrete screed which would maintain its heat through those cold winter weeks, giving thermal support to the heating mats in … Read More

FloVENT, Electronics Cooling, HVAC, underfloor heating

3D simulation can provide a detailed prediction of temperature and heat flux values at 10s of 1000s of points in a 3D model, experimental methods are somewhat limited in terms of the wealth of data they are capable of providing. But hey, this isn’t going to degrade into a pitched battle between simulators and experimentalists, nowadays good engineers (should) do both. “No one believes simulation … Read More

HVAC, Electronics Cooling, underfloor heating, FloVENT