Temperature management of electronics matters and today is even more critical for the proper operation of systems. As Andre Pope of Mentor Graphics noted in his blog post, “How thermal testing can help increase reliability of electronic systems? ”
According to a study of the US Air Force Avionics Integrity Program from about two decades ago failure of electronics systems in about 55% of all cases was due to thermal issues. This figure is being quoted since then. Actually, I have my personal evidence for this from my own history of using a PC at home. My actual PC at home broke down twice. The first breakdown was something I could smell and see – there was a smoke signal issued by the machine: the controller IC in its hard-drive electronics simply burnt out. The second computer breakdown I had was when my 7 years old no-name PC stopped working completely. In this case I was not sure if it was a real hardware failure. I suspected that either the BIOS has forgotten its contents or my well known operating system gave up after 7 years of service. So, the ratio is 50-50.
Thus, making sure that we eliminate half of the possible failures is really very important. With such an action we can double the reliability of our systems. The question is, how one can achieve reducing the number of thermal problems? Of course with thermal-aware design. By doing so, we can eliminate our own failures.
In short, reliability is directly affected by temperature! Or, in mathematical terms:
This answers the “why we should” care about thermal management certainly, but, why is thermal management such a challenge? Well, at ATS our team has identified five reasons:
- Higher Frequency Circuits result in high heat flux
- Smaller Packaging hence, high speed circuits tighter placement and higher density
- Low Acoustic Noise Requirements Force chassis designers to utilize low-to-medium (200-400 LFM) speed air flow
- Circuit Designers Determine Component Placement Sometimes resulting in less-than-optimal air flow at the PCB level
- EMI Shielding Because of High Frequency Results in constricted area for air passage
I’m sure each of us could identify with at least one of the challenges we’ve listed above. And, those challenges – the raising of the bar if you will – is what we need to focus on to provide successful thermal management.
One of the ways we work with engineers is to educate them on thermal solutions; one tool we have for that is our Qpedia Thermal Journal, its published online once month, you can get the current copy, free, from our engineering staff to you by visiting, Qpedia Current Issue