Many times at ATS during consulting with our engineering customers we discuss ways to sustain effective cooling as components get smaller and their power levels rise. Yet, continuing advances in packaging and die technology are increasing the demands for thermal management.
One result is pressure on engineers to replace low cost, so called, “standard” heat sinks with optimized higher performance heat sinks at or near the cost of the low cost “standard” type. Generally speaking, an optimized design will provide much better cooling for a given size of heat sink. This higher performance will often mean that a higher frequency semiconductor can be used increasing the overall value of the system in design.
One caution is to consider the air flow to the heat sink itself. At times, a higher performing heat sink is thought to be needed when what is really needed is a PCB board spin to optimize air flow and reduce the overall cost of the design and even the PCB BOM. ATS’s thermal engineering team has put together a case study and white paper about this topic, you can get your free copy here, “The Effect of Compact PCB Layout on Thermal Management“
