What I Learned About Heatsinks Using Thermal Simulation


By Yousaf Mohammed, Student Intern at Mentor Graphics When designing electronics, heat dissipated to the surroundings by micro devices is an important consideration because heat has a powerful and stringent effect on their operation and lifespan.  When an electronic device overheats, components start to wear out more quickly, degrade, cross the threshold into safe mode, and then stop functi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 17


Shrinking perovskites Researchers from Imperial College London, Oxford University, Diamond Light Source, Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea, and Rutgers University have discovered a material that can be chemically tailored to either expand or contract in a precise way and over a wide temperature range. This could lead to new composite materials that do not expand when heate... » read more

Power Management Heats Up


Power management has been talked about a lot recently, especially when it comes to mobile devices. But power is only a part of the issue—and perhaps not even the most important part. Heat is the ultimate limiter. If you cannot comfortably place the device on your face or wrist, then you will not have a successful product. Controlling heat, at the micro and macro levels, is an important asp... » read more

Will 3D-IC Work?


Advanced packaging is becoming real on every level, from fan-outs to advanced fan-outs, 2.5D, and 3D-ICs for memory. But just how far 3D and monolithic 3D will go isn't clear at this point. The reason is almost entirely due to heat. In a speech at SEMI's Integrated Strategy Symposium in January, Babek Sabi, Intel corporate VP and director of assembly and test technology development, warned t... » read more

Thermal Damage To Chips Widens


Heat is becoming a much bigger problem for semiconductor and system design, fueled by higher density and the increasing use of complex chips in markets such as automotive, where reliability is measured in decade-long increments. In the past, heat typically was handled by mechanical engineers, who figured out where to put heat sinks, fans, or holes to funnel heat out of a chassis. But as more... » read more

A Better Way To Measure Heat


Are you an engineering manager with budget responsibility, concerned about the thermal performance of your company’s designs or manufactured products? Or, are you a senior engineer who is responsible for the thermal design or characterization of components and systems? In either situation, the results of using the transient thermal testing method would be of benefit to you. The method is non-... » read more

Accurate Thermal Analysis, Including Thermal Coupling Of On-Chip Hot Interconnect


Driven by rapid advancement in mobile/server computing and automotive/communications, SoCs are experiencing a fast pace of functional integration along with technology scaling. Advanced low power techniques are widely used, while meeting higher performance requirements using a variety of packaging technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) is further opening up new applications with connected d... » read more

New System Requirements Demand a Creatively Choreographed Ecosystem


In the past, integrated circuits, packages and boards were all designed independently, and yet in most cases still managed to fit together with very few functional or technical problems. However, recent advances in chip performance have changed this process dramatically. New designs, processes and materials already have been seen in packaging as high-performance semiconductor chips need to c... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 14


Photo-doping semiconductors Scientists at Michigan State University found that by shooting an ultrafast laser pulse into a semiconducting material, its properties would change as if it had been chemically doped, in a process known as photo-doping. "The material we studied is an unconventional semiconductor made of alternating atomically thin layers of metals and insulators," said Chong-Yu... » read more

Thermal Is Still Simmering


With the ever increasing sophistication in today’s high-performance [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s on top of sheer physics of device manufacturing, thermal is a much bigger concern than ever before. It is well understood that thermal and power are closely related, and there exists a vicious cycle between leakage power and temperature: leakage goes up, temperature goes up; temperature goes ... » read more

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