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