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Beating the Heat: A Review of Thermal Management Challenges
August 13, 2013 | Joe Fjelstad, Verdant ElectronicsEstimated reading time: 1 minute
Heat is a by-product of the operation of every electronic device, be it large or small. The amount of heat produced by some devices, such as digital watches and small calculators, may be nearly immeasurable, but where there is resistance, there is also heat. For larger and more powerful electronic devices, heat is much more apparent, as anyone who has actually used a laptop on their lap can attest. With the industry’s unceasing effort to increase product performance by shrinking transistors and circuits, an unfortunate increase in thermal energy densities on ICs has occurred. Today, the matter of elevated temperatures on the chip is an increasingly important issue for chip, package, and system designers for a very important reason: the inverse relationship between long-term reliability and higher temperatures. Stated more simply, as the chip gets hotter and/or spends more time at an elevated temperature, the reliability of the die, and thus the product in which it is used, tends to worsen. Armed with this knowledge, technologists have directed significantly more attention toward thermal management of electronic systems, beginning with the IC. Interestingly, this is not the first time the issue has arisen. Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the industry was facing a similar problem when bipolar chip design and manufacturing technology dominated. At that time, numerous thermal management solutions were being developed and offered to address the problem of high thermal loads on the chip and in the system. However, relatively few of those solutions were put to use because CMOS technology took over as the process of choice for semiconductor design and manufacture, especially for microprocessors and other high-transistor-density devices. CMOS was a much more efficient and cooler operating approach for IC chips. Read the full article here.Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of SMT Magazine.