Tracy Valentine and Jim Renehan over at the Trenton Technology blog have a terrific post entitle, “Can You Really Simplify Integration of Industrial Computer Systems? ”
After being in the industrial segment for 25 years from Multi-Bus I, through II, S-Bus, Q-Bus, VME, cPCI, ATCA, ISA and so on I can say that what Tracy and Jim wrote is dead on. They did a great job covering the hardware and software side, but what about the thermal side?
Most times the thermal management part of the equation is left at the point of, “hey slap a bigger heat sink on it” or “use a more powerful fan”. The assumption is that if a board or chip are being offered by an OEM that said OEM has done the heavy lifting in thermal analysis. In many cases they have to the degree of the thermal analysis and the cooling envelope, if you will, that the chip and the board are tested to. But, from our experience and from conversations with chip and board suppliers, when you ask them who ultimately owns making the thermal management system work together, they all point to the final integrator. As one chip vendor told us,
We really don’t see ourselves as part of the thermal solution. We design our chips to an envelope and if you design to that you should be fine
And that is indeed the case if a given system or board is standing alone by itself in a lab. But the real world of industrial computing isn’t about that. It’s about, as Tracy and Jim write:
- System location requirements
- Projected service life of the system
- Number of option cards needed in the computer
- System expansion requirements
- System power and fail-over requirements
- System O/S and application software solution requirements
And in the midst of these, the thermal management all play an important part. The different components integrated together along with the environment they are in, have a direct impact on the thermal management.
We have a few resources that can help integration engineers deal with this important issue and get the best thermal solution possible so that the total system operates optimally.
First, ATS performed a heat sink optimization for a 16-core packet processing PCI-X card. The card is uses in industrial computing systems for a variety of communication applications. The important point to our study, published in RTC Magazine, is how the board wasn’t characterized and solutioned standalone, but in a typical industrial system that it will be used in. Oh, and we found the BIOS integration of the system was really a bear to get right before we could even advance to the thermal piece!
Second, we have an on-demand webinar we invite you to view, “Analytical, Computational, and Experimental Thermal Analysis of an xTCA Chassis” The front end of the presentation is a little wonky, but the material will be very helpful for integrators.
Third, our on-demand webinar, “Heat Sink Selection Made Easy” is a very helpful webinar to assist in choosing the best heatsinks for those boards all being integrated together. Don’t think this is an easy task. ATS has been winning major thermal consulting contracts from leading Telecomm OEMs because the system thermal design, including the heat sinks, is becoming more and more challenging.
Hats off to Trenton Technology for bringing up this tough issue. Off the shelf platforms that Trenton Technologies and other industrial and embedded computing suppliers make DO speed up time to market (in some cases 9 to 12 months faster!) and allow end-OEMS to focus on what they do best (the application!).
