Thermal Floorplanning For Chips


Heat management is becoming crucial to an increasing number of chips, and it's one of a growing number of interconnected factors that must be considered throughout the entire development flow. At the same time, design requirements are exacerbating thermal problems. Those designs either have to increase margins or become more intelligent about the way heat is generated, distributed, and dissi... » read more

Mapping Heat Across A System


Thermal issues are becoming more difficult to resolve as chip features get smaller and systems get faster and more complex. They now require the integration of technologies from both the design and manufacturing flows, making design for power and heat a much broader problem. This is evident with the evolution of a smart phone. Phones sold 10 years ago were very different devices. Functionali... » read more

Recent Advances in Thermal Metamaterials and Their Future Applications for Electronics Packaging


Abstract: "Thermal metamaterials exhibit thermal properties that do not exist in nature but can be rationally designed to offer unique capabilities of controlling heat transfer. Recent advances have demonstrated successful manipulation of conductive heat transfer and led to novel heat guiding structures such as thermal cloaks, concentrators, etc. These advances imply new opportunities to gui... » read more

Development Of An Extremely High Thermal Conductivity TIM For Large Electronics Packages In 4th Industrial Revolution Era


The capability and diversity of high-performance microprocessors is increasing with each process technology generation to meet increasing application demands. The cooling designs for these chips must deal with larger temperature gradients across the die than previous generations. Dissipation of the thermal energy from heat generating parts to a heat sink via conduction occurs through a thermal ... » read more

Thermal Challenges And Moore’s Law


Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, looks at the evolution of graphics cards over a couple of decades and how designs changed to deal with more graphics and more heat, and why smaller, faster and cheaper doesn’t apply in this market. » read more

A Complete Guide To Enclosure Thermal Design… 14 Key Considerations


Enclosure design is an important aspect of system level thermal management to ensure electronics performance and reliability. Learn how to improve enclosure design in this guide covering 14 considerations on thermal management best practice. Examples of areas to focus on for advantages in cooling efficiency are illustrated and where tradeoff decisions are needed. Newly updated as of 2018, this... » read more

Heatsinks Here, There, Everywhere!


Heatsinks are often perceived to be the magic answer to all electronics cooling challenges. A heatsink makes heat spread out, so that it passes to the air over a much larger surface area than it would otherwise. Air then carries the heat away, cooling the electronics that generated it. So, why not place a heatsink on top of any thermally critical component? To read more, click here. » read more

Advanced Packaging Is Suddenly Very Cool


The hottest chip markets today—automotive AI for autonomous and heavily assisted driving, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality—all are beginning to look at advanced packaging as the best path forward for improving performance and reducing power. Over the past four years, which is when 2.5D and fan-out wafer-level packaging first really began garnering interest, these and othe... » read more

Intelligent Power Allocation


The modern System-on-Chip (SoC) has higher thermal dissipation than its previous generations, because of the following factors: Increasing processor frequencies. Decreasing SoC package and device sizes. Higher levels of integration. Static power consumption trends with the most advanced SoC fabrication. Faster frequencies mean faster switching, which means more power consumpt... » read more

Controlling Heat


Modeling on-chip thermal characteristics and chip-package interactions is becoming much more critical for advanced designs, but how to get there isn't always clear. Every chip, based on its target application, has a thermal design power (TDP) target. This is the typical power it can consume without overreaching the acceptable thermal limits in its intended environment. But in order to rate t... » read more

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