Tag Archives: heat sink

ATS Thermal Labs video shows how their superGRIP Heat Sink Clip-On Attachment works

Posted on July 28, 2010 by | Leave a comment

We’ve released a video that demonstrates how our superGRIP Heat Sink clip-on attachment system works. It shows how an industry clip works and then how superGRIP works. Both have their application niche certainly but isn’t nice to know there’s a clip out there that allows thermal engineers to:

  • Provides tight, secure heat sink attachment in shock and vibration environments
  • Occupies minimal area around chip, allowing its use in densely populated PCBs
  • Allows the heat sink to be detached and reattached without damaging the component or the PCB
  • Strong, uniform attachment force helps achieve maximum performance from phase-changing TIMs

If you have questions on if superGRIP is right for you, or just want to purchase them or ask for samples, you can visit our superGRIP products page or drop us some mail at [email protected]

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Posted in heat sink, Heat Sink Attach

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The Seven Factors Affecting LED Operating Temperature and Thermal Design

Posted on July 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

At ATS we’ve done a good deal of basic thermal analysis and thermal design for LED lighting. While the “bulb” of an LED light is generally cool, the electronics to drive that light, behind the LED, are quite hot. Our engineers have identified seven factors that affect LED operating temperature. Engineers developing heatsinks or other thermal management solutions need to consider these:

  1. Input Drive Current
  2. Binning Variations in forward voltage
  3. Steady state, pulsed or conditioned light output
  4. Operating ambient conditions
  5. The degree of solar irradiation
  6. Thermal path (that is, thermal resistance) from the LED junction to ambient
  7. Wattage Output of the LED(s) per dissipating surface area

All of these are key factors that engineers should consider when developing an LED lamp or LED light display thermal management solution.

For more information on how to design a solid cooling solution for LED, our readers are invited to our LED thermal management webinar being held on September 23rd, 2PM. Click to the following link to register, “LED Thermal Management in Commercial and Consumer Lighting Applications“.

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Posted in LED

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LED Thermal Management Design: How to decide when it’s worth paying for the lower thermal impedance of an LED’s MCPCB’s dielectric?

Posted on July 1, 2010 by | Leave a comment

EDN has a nice article write up on how to decide when it’s worth paying for the lower thermal impedance? Margery Conner, who covers LEDs, solid-state lighting, alternate energy sources, and sensors on her beat, notes the following in her trailer lead-in:

The thermal characteristics of the metal-clad pc-board (MCPCB) in LED lighting is becoming increasingly important. Back when LED packages had fairly poor thermal impedance numbers, the thermal characteristics of the MCPCB weren’t so important. But today’s packaged LEDs have increasingly good (low) thermal impedance numbers, and as the package’s thermal impedance drops, the thermal impedance of the MCPCB’s dielectric plays a bigger role.

The answer? Well according to Berquist’s Steve Taylor, quoted in EDN’s article, is to “making a quick calculation to determine the LED package’s normalized thermal impedance”. But that’s just the start. Go have a read for yourself to read the rest, it’s a great take and solution on good design for LED thermal management; Here’s the link, “Normalize LED package thermal impedance for optimum thermal design“

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Posted in LED

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Fujipoly releases new, high performance additions to its Sarcon line of Thermal Interface Material

Posted on June 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Fujipoly, a firm we featured in the ATS Thermal Interface Material Resource Roundup, have released a duo of additions to their fine line of Sarcon specially formulated thermal interface materials. Applicable to an aluminum heat sink, copper heatsink or other applications requiring low thermal resistance gap filler pad compounds, Sarcon 100GR-HL and SARCON XR-Um-Al are both available now from Fujipoly.

SARCON XR-Um-Al is a uniquely formulated gap filler compound that has a putty-like consistency. This physical property contributes to the material’s extremely low contact and thermal resistance while maintaining a thermal conductivity of 17 watt/m-k. The gap filler pad is manufactured with a thin aluminum carrier film for customer-friendly application. The low adhesion aluminum barrier enables users to remove the carrier film after installation with no pull-out effect. This thermal interface material is available in sheets up to 50mm x 50mm with thicknesses ranging from 0.2mm to 0.5mm.

SARCON 100GR-HL is a thermal gap filler pad manufactured with a hardened top surface. The unique, one-sided treatment is less tacky than the opposing surface allowing the thermal pad to consistently adhere to either the target electrical component or opposing heat sink. The hard surface allows for effortless removal without tearing or damaging the material during assembly and rework operations. Sarcon® 100GR-HL transfers heat with a thermal conductivity of 2.8 W/m°K and a thermal resistance of .44°Cin2/W at 72.5 PSI. This 1.0mm thick, flame retardant TIM is available in sheets up to 300mm x 200mm.

Thermal interface material is an important part of a thermal management system. So important in fact we’d like to point our readers to a couple of resources we’ve put together here at ATS. The first is our white paper, “When to use thermal interface material with your heatsink and why?” The second is an on-demand webinar we have made available to the thermal engineering community entitled, “Heat Sink Selection Made Easy“, in which we cover a bit about thermal interface material relative to heatsink selection. These materials are free of charge of course. If you’ve got questions or need a bit of help with your thermal engineering, give us a try, companies like Lucent, and Motorola already have. Call us at 781-949-2521 or email us at [email protected]

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Posted in Thermal Interface Material

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Aluminum heatsink design uses passive cooling for high end graphics but don’t forget about your chassis fan strategy

Posted on June 29, 2010 by | Leave a comment

At ATS we’ve long been proponents of pushing the limits of thermal management using air. Why? No one wants truly wants to use liquid cooling in their computers be they workstations, servers, telecommunication servers or any other compute engines. Plumbing is something most engineers want to avoid. So our team applauded the release of Sapphire’s passive heatsink cooled graphics card, their HD5670.

The key thing to note on this card thermally is the unique geometry of the aluminum heatsink, aluminum heatpipe and fins. Thin and compressed to their graphics card, the PCI card’s silhouette requires only one X16 lane graphics slot. Sapphire doesn’t mention recommended air flow but they do suggest for best cooling performance, a chassis installed with at least one 120mm or 90mm fan is required.

Our team thought this design was well done, and a great application for passive heatsink cooling. Some thoughts we had included:

First, the required air flow amount and air flow velocity are key for a proper thermal management solution. These will be a function of what else you have in your chassis of course, CPU, memory, disk drives etc. A key critical point is do not block the air flow to known hot components and boards in your chassis. This is a common mistake we see at ATS be it computing or telecommunications. We’ve done a write up on how to choose a fan for your computer chassis on our blog, you can read it by visiting, “Five Basic Steps When Designing for a Cooling Fan Thermal Management”

Second, whether your fans are at the air inlet or outlet makes a difference and that needs to be considered. Always mount your cooling fans on the inlet side of your electronics chassis. This allows you to direct the highest velocity airflow to the areas of greatest need. In our example here, the Sapphire graphics card and your CPU (many thanks to Tony Koryban for his wisdom on fan placement)

With creative designs like Sapphires and the correct choice and placement of fans, air cooling continues to be an excellent choice for many thermal management problems. If you need help designing such a passive heatsink approach, drop some mail to us at [email protected]

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Posted in heat pipe, heat sink, thermal management

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