Category Archives: Thermal Design

As we like to say in our thermal design labs at ATS, it’s all about JUNCTION TEMPERATURE at the IC.   Cooling your IC is what it’s all about to get a cooler electronics system and our friends at Mentor Graphics/FloTHERM have a tool to help out with that.  Dubbed FloTHERM IC, the package, “is deployed as a unique web-based platform that delivers a high level of automation to the design tasks associated with full-spectrum thermal characterization and validation”.

Sounds good to  us!  Anything that leads to cooler systems is a plus in our book.   You can check out the new softwware at FloTHERM IC.

Research in solar heating has been ongoing for the last four decades. Only recently has it attracted more attention, due to high fuel prices and concerns over global warming. Proper thermal management of solar heating systems is an important part of their design.  Our article discusses this trend and actions that can be taken: http://bit.ly/bJxDqT

ATS will be holding another of it’s well attended thermal engineering webinars on Thursday, February 25th at 2PM EST, “How to Perform and Understand Temperature Measurement within Electronic Systems”

The importance of this topic was underscored in a recent interview with ATS thermal engineer, Mike Haskell, at ATS’s Norwood campus.

“We’ve seen a variety of issues in our lab from some simple, correctable, mistakes in using thermal measurement instruments’, said Mike, “if  you don’t use the instruments day in and day out like our team does, simple mistakes can occur”.   Mike mentioned two errors the ATS thermal team has seen with customers.

“One of the first common mistakes we see in our thermal lab is the incorrect placement of thermal couples and the incorrect attachment of thermal couples”.  Mike continued, “This is most commonly seen in applications involved in monitoring of a processor of some kind”.

“The second most common problem in measurement that we see is an error resulting from incorrectly measuring ambient air temperature inside an electronics chassis.”  Mike noted that such an error is common because of either pre-heated air or irregular air flow patterns inside an electronics enclosure.  Common errors such as these can result in incorrect data leading to a sub-optimal thermal management solution.  ATS’s webinar on “How to Perform and Understand Temperature Measurement within Electronic Systems” is designed to equip the practicing thermal engineer to avoid such common pitfalls.

The webinar is no charge, and can be registered for by clicking, “”How to Perform and Understand Temperature Measurement within Electronic Systems“

In order to meet contractual and design requirements, telecomm equpiment destined for certain networks in North America must be tested to the Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) standard and comply with its requirements.   NEBS describes the environment of a typical Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) Central Office (CO).  Telcordia GR-63-CORE is a NEBS standard that governs the spatial and environmental hardware requirements of a products for use in a CO.  Adherence to the NEBS requirements is deemed essential to the reliability, availability, and durability of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)

Designing to these specifications include the thermal design of the system as well.  ATS’s white paper and QPedia article, NEBS Compliance Testing: Thermal Management can help you successfully design to these standards.