Category Archives: Heat Sinks

Intel Gulftown CPU gets a new heat sink, heat pipe, and fan cooling system

Posted on April 29, 2010 by | 2 comments

Intel’s release of it’s Core i7-980x Extreme 6-Core will surely “heat up” the cpu market. It’s hot at 130W and it’s fast. You can check out a review of Gulftown at Hot Hardware here. But what about cooling it?

Cooling 130W CPU is like any other hot semicondutor. You have to ask yourself the basic questions:

  • What maximum heat sink height can you have?
  • What maximum heat sink length can you have?
  • What maximum heat sink width can you have?
  • What is your component length?
  • What is your component width?
  • What is your available airflow velocity?
  • What is the power dissipation?

Having that data you can begin to figure out how to specify the right heat sink. A small system (like a 1u rack mount server) requires a different approach than a cabinet or deskside type of chassis.

In the case of Intel they’ve chosen to suggest their new cooler which is really a fin based heat sink, heat pipe and fan. Put those three together and you have a cooling system. We’ve done a little article on how these gigantic cooling systems work here at heatsinks.wordpress.com; just click to our article here.

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Posted in heat pipe, heat sink, Heat Sink Attach, Heat Sinks, Intel

Terrific resource in EP&T to help you choose the right thermal interface material for your heat sink

Posted on April 29, 2010 by | Leave a comment

EP&T (Electronic Products and Technology) magazine has a terrific little article on thermal interface material (TIM) and how to choose the right one. They’ve got some excellent slides as well that can help you systematically choose what you need. Well worth reading.

You can find the article and resources here at EP&T Magazine: “Higher frequencies leading to rising power and EMI in traditionally low power electronic devices”

ATS has produced a white paper that makes a good companion to the EP&T Magazine Article. You can get your own copy by clicking to, “When to Use a Thermal Interface Material and What Type“.

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Posted in Heat Sinks, Thermal Interface Material

Microchannel blog post roundup – research and practice on microchannel technology for thermal management

Posted on April 26, 2010 by | Leave a comment

There’s been a bit of talk on the internet about microchannels and their use in thermal management for electronics. As a service to our readers of ATS’ Thermal Blog we thought we’d put together a roundup of some of the microchannel coverage at Advanced Thermal Solutions and a few other sources just to help you have a single location to either renew your knowledge or bring you up to speed. This isn’t an exhaustive guide but more like a series of articles for overview:

  1. Microchannel Concepts and Recent Advances: An ATS Thermal Lab white paper from 2007 with good general information on the topic of microchannels
  2. Understanding how fluid boils in tiny microchannels gives engineers another tool to cool high-power electronics: A report on work being done at Purdue University on commercializing microchannels for thermal management
  3. The Thermal Peformance of Microchannel and Macrochannel Cold Plates: Covers the basics of the technology and thermal performance of microchannel and macrochannel cold plates.
  4. Direct Cooling of Power Modules by Using Micro-Channel Structures: an ATS Labs “how to” article: Microchannels can have a variety of applications, cooling power modules is one of them
  5. How to implement liquid cooling at the chip level: liquid cooled microchannel heat sinks to the rescue!: A technical article covering the “how to” on using microchannels in heat sinks.
  6. How to use silicon to create a cost effective and thermally effecient microchannel heat sink: How to create a cost effective and thermally efficient heat sink using microchannels

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Posted in Heat Sinks, Microchannels, Thermal Research, Thermal Science

Tony Koryban Mail Bag Archives: Attaching a heat sink to an RF amplifier properly

Posted on April 23, 2010 by | 26 comments

Heat sink attachment is as important as the heat sink itself.  That’s one reason why ATS invented maxiGRIP and superGRIP heat sink attachment.  But what about RF devices?  Well, Tony Koryban got just such a question in his mailbag:

Dear Doggone Thermal Guy,?

I have an RF amplifier device which operates fairly inefficiently. Only about 1/3 of the power it takes in goes out as RF . The rest is dissipated as heat (5 watts).?? The figure below shows an arrangement recommended by the RF amplifier vendor to insure that the chip is well-connected to the heat sink. The heat sink is mounted on the side of the board opposite the device. To get an adequate thermal path, the vendor recommends a “pedestal” or pin, which is press fit into the sink, and soldered to the backside of the device (the device has a metal backside plate for this purpose).?

Some of our circuit designers have tried this approach, but using a “solder plug” instead of a pin/pedestal.? This seems to work, but our manufacturing group says it is hard to manufacture. I can see why, since it must take a bit of work to fill a 1/8 inch diameter hole full of solder.? Other designers say that simply stitching the front and back planes of the circuit with a dense pack of vias will be enough.?

Do you have any recommendations? We want to make sure that the heat sink is well-connected, but also that the board design is manufacturable.?

Murky in Albuquerque?

How would you solve this problem?   Tony Koryban has an idea or two, and you can learn his approach by clicking over to:  “Tony Koryban Mailbag Archives”

P.S., don’t tell Tony we said this but you can see him, in person, at
Cooling Zone 2010

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Posted in heat sink, Heat Sink Attach, Heat Sinks, RF

LED Heat Sink Cooling: CeramCool Made from Aluminum Nitride Ceramic Cools 75W/cm(2)

Posted on April 22, 2010 by | 1 comment

Ceramtec has released it’s CeramCool Liquid Cooling made from the aluminum nitride ceramic Alunit cools packing densities of up to 75W / cm².   CeramCool Liquid Cooling using the alumina ceramic Rubalit cools 290W on 120mm; with Alunit, it is an impressive 640W on the same construction. No other design can achieve this and still assure such a long lifetime. The new geometry features three cooling channels to provide a homogeneous LED temperature.

You can learn about this exciting new heat sink solution for LED at this link at CeramTec:  CeramCool made from Alunit

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Posted in heat sink, Heat Sinks, LED