The automotive industry is undergoing a seismic shift toward eMobility. Electric vehicles are estimated to account for 30% of worldwide vehicle sales by 2030 and 60% by 2040. However, despite growing adoption, consumers are concerned about low driving ranges, long charging times, and the availability of charging stations. In addition, when it comes to long-distance road…
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High-performance computing (HPC) systems are chasing performance as businesses and research facilities search for powerful processors to keep pace with unrelenting data growth. While government and research labs have historically been the primary users of HPC systems, in recent years, the split between the public and private sector is almost exactly 50/50. In 2019, nearly…
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Phased array radar systems have emerged as an enabling technology in defense and aerospace systems. By employing electronic beam steering, phased array radars have many advantages over traditionally mechanically actuated radars, such as highly controllable coverage, fewer moving parts, fast target switching, and more. How can we optimize our phased array systems to get the…
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Q: How can we capture the high performance of silicon carbide (SiC) while delivering a cost-effective power module? A: Using enhanced cooling techniques to reduce the number of SiC chips, at the same total current, while sustaining safe operating temperatures. Inverter power modules are a critical component for power conversion processes in electric vehicle traction,…
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Q: How can we reduce the water usage of data center cooling towers? A: Elevate the temperature of the coolant to enable non-evaporative ambient cooling to be used a higher percentage of the year. Many data centers use cooling towers to reject heat from their IT equipment into the ambient atmosphere. Cooling towers operate on…
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Data centers consume a lot of energy. As of 2017, data centers constituted 3% of the world’s electricity usage, amounting to a whopping 416 terawatts worldwide [1]. With recent increases in remote work and edge computing, this metric may well increase in years to come. But what exactly contributes to all of this energy usage?…
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One of the biggest mistakes a thermal engineer can make in estimating the junction temperature of a semiconductor device is hidden in a second-order effect. Many know that a material’s properties can have a temperature dependence. However, many engineers overlook that the temperature dependence of thermal conductivity in semiconductors can have big consequences. A common…
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When attaching an electronic device to a heat sink or heat spreader, it is critical to create good thermal contact to avoid high contact thermal resistances. To do so, thermal interface materials (TIMs) are often applied as intermediate layers between surfaces to improve the thermal pathway from where the heat is generated to where it’s…
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Flexible tubing is a very handy fluid conveyance option in liquid cooling systems. The ability to snake tubes into tight areas and avoid other components, without the need to do complex, high-precision tube bending of rigid tubes, makes system integrators’ lives easier during installation and maintenance. But how do these flexible tubes interface with pumps,…
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As electronic devices miniaturize, what happens to our cooling solutions? It’d be favorable if the heat sink area shrank concurrently so that we could fit more devices in the same space as before, and therefore achieve higher functionality in a smaller size. But with smaller devices comes higher power densities, making cooling that much more…
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