{"id":311,"date":"2012-07-22T21:43:48","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T02:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/?page_id=311"},"modified":"2014-04-13T20:28:09","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T01:28:09","slug":"everything-you-know-is-wrong-october-2001","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/?page_id=311","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Know Is Wrong October 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"

Answers to those Doggone Thermal Design Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Tony Kordyban<\/strong><\/p>\n

Copyright by Tony Kordyban 2001<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Doggone Thermal Guy,<\/p>\n

Our company is a giant manufacturer of specialty sportswear fabrics and lenses for automotive taillights (the ones that smash so easily when a grocery cart taps them in the parking lot).\u00a0 We recently entered the electronics cooling business when our CEO saw a story in the Wall Street Journal about microprocessor power doubling every three to five years.\u00a0 We think our carbon fiber impregnated plastics, which didn’t quite take off as anti-sharkbite armor or black-shaded taillight lenses, would make great heat transfer interfaces for electronic assemblies.<\/p>\n

My job is to get the word out.\u00a0 I have been manning booths at trade shows and putting our name on magazine bingo cards for months.\u00a0 The three engineers I finally talked to were thrilled with the possibilities of our products, but it’s harder to get our information into the hands of a thermal engineer than to feed Brussels sprouts to a four-year old.<\/p>\n

How do you look for thermal product information when you need it?\u00a0 If I knew that, I’d know where to place it.<\/p>\n

Joe Gladhand from Plaidsville<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Joe,<\/p>\n

I think I saw your booth last summer.\u00a0 Was that the one that gave away the glow-in-the-dark cardboard slide rule for converting F to C degrees?\u00a0 I think it’s at the bottom of my junk drawer in the lab.<\/p>\n

It used to be I’d keep a whole file cabinet of suppliers’ catalogs, and a pencil drawer full of sales rep business cards.\u00a0 It used to pay to know the biggest pack rat in the office, the geek who actually kept all his catalogs in alphabetical order.<\/p>\n

But then they invented the Internet.\u00a0 After I learned how to use it, and then, after many of my suppliers learned how to use it as well, all those catalogs, brochures, industrial directories and business cards went straight into the recycling bin.<\/p>\n

Now, when I need data on heat sinks, fans, thermal interface materials, or electronic component packaging, I go straight to the vendor’s web site.\u00a0 No calling a local sales rep, no playing phone tag with an application engineer, no begging a literature distribution clerk to send me a catalog that is already three years out of date.\u00a0 A good vendor’s web site has all its product data available to me at the click of a mouse.\u00a0 A poor web site has just a nice photo of the company headquarters and a list of phone numbers to call for more information.<\/p>\n

Notice I didn’t say the vendors or their products were good or bad.\u00a0 Some of the best products have the worst web sites, with absolutely no technical information on them.\u00a0 Or worse yet, they require you to register and get a password just to look at their product data sheets.\u00a0 I hate to say it, but when I am searching for new product information, and I hit a web site that doesn’t want to give me the information I want, I quickly jump to the next one on my list, no matter how good the vendor might be.\u00a0 I admit it.\u00a0 I am spoiled.\u00a0 Give me my data now, or just forget about it.\u00a0 I don’t want to wait for a return phone call or for somebody to fax me the datasheet.\u00a0 Show me the datasheet on line.<\/p>\n

So, Joe, keep going to the trade shows, keep putting ads in magazines, and keep cold-calling prospects.\u00a0 All that still has a place.\u00a0 But in addition to that, make a good web site.\u00a0 Put everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that any customer might conceivably want to know about your products on it.\u00a0 Forget the fancy animation and 3-D graphics — make the darn web site searchable.\u00a0 Maybe I want to know who some of your well known customers are.\u00a0 Maybe I want to know if you offer a thermal grease that is transparent to infrared radiation.\u00a0 I should be able to find out either one of those things in less than 60 seconds.<\/p>\n

Such a web site will not be easy to put together, so don’t leave it to your kid in junior high.\u00a0 Get some professionals to put it together. \u00a0Have real customers try it out, and if they complain, listen to them.\u00a0 Once you have a decent web site, make sure we can find it.\u00a0 Pay for a good web address.\u00a0 I think IBM uses www.ibm.com, for one obvious example.\u00a0 Then pay the top search engines to list your site.\u00a0 I know they ought to do it for free, but if you want to be near the top of the list of 15,000 web sites that pop up when I search for the phrase “carbon fibers”, you will have to shell out a few bucks.<\/p>\n

2012 Update: \u00a0Things have improved a lot. \u00a0You can google almost any part number and go right to the data sheet. \u00a0(Yeah, I used google as a verb. \u00a0And when I want to use Bing to find something, I’ll google Bing to find out it url.) \u00a0And now electronic component distributors include data sheets right in their on-line catalogs. \u00a0Some places still force you to register just to find out the operating temperature limit of a memory chip (Is that really a trade secret?), but overall, I’d say we are entering a new age of thermal data availability.<\/p>\n

Still can’t find much on Theta j-b, though.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Tony,<\/em><\/p>\n

A couple of years ago when sales were great, the biggest problem my management had was deciding between domestic and imported champagne at the stock option parties.\u00a0 Now management is looking to cut costs and everybody else is scrambling to justify their existence.\u00a0 My manager, like most, has a vague idea that keeping circuits from getting too hot is a good idea, but how can I convince him that thermal engineering has a direct benefit on the bottom line of the company?<\/em><\/p>\n

Scrambler from Scranton<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Scrambler,<\/p>\n

I hear you, friend.\u00a0 For too long the thermal engineer has been the most invisible member of the electronic hardware design team.\u00a0 Unfortunately, when times get tough, the only visibility the thermal engineer has is in the payroll department.\u00a0 Here is the e-mail I’d send to my manager arguing for NOT cutting the thermal engineer, or perhaps even looking to add more:<\/p>\n

\n

Dear Bottom Line Manager,<\/em><\/p>\n

We are not in the business of selling thermal design solutions.\u00a0 We design and sell electronic hardware.\u00a0 Our customers don’t care if it has the latest optimum heat sink, they just want it to work, and for the right price.\u00a0 So it’s easy for anybody to think that the work done by the thermal engineer doesn’t contribute much to the bottom line. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But just take a look at this chart.\u00a0 It is the industry roadmap for how power dissipation for high-performance microprocessor chips will increase over the next few years. (Adapted from:\u00a0 The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors<\/a>, 2000 Update Report)\u00a0 This is not just my guess, but the consensus of industry experts, based on plans already in the works at the chip making companies.\u00a0 How good is this roadmap?\u00a0 Past roadmaps were wrong ? power went up faster than they had predicted.<\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe 100 watts on a single chip doesn’t sound like a lot to you.\u00a0 I?ll give you a sense of scale.\u00a0 At 0.1 watt on a chip, you don’t need much of anything to keep it cool.\u00a0 That’s what chips were like in the 70’s and 80’s when we didn’t have a thermal engineer.\u00a0 At 1.0 watt per chip, you have to be a little careful how you lay out components on a board to keep them from getting too hot.\u00a0 At 10 watts per chip, you need somebody who knows what he is doing to select the right heat sink.\u00a0 At 100 watts per chip, you need a thermal expert involved with the design from concept all the way through manufacture to make sure your product will not be killed by thermal problems.\u00a0 Above 100 watts per chip, (not far away on the current roadmap) you need a miracle.<\/em><\/p>\n

So we are faced with a dilemma for new product development.\u00a0 If we don’t use the latest technology chips that are being introduced, then our products will be slower, bulkier, and support fewer features than our competitor’s products.\u00a0 In a short time we won’t have any customers, and therefore no bottom line.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

So I guess we will have to give in and use the latest available chips with their ever-increasing power.\u00a0 But without that thermal engineer on hand, those high power chips just aren’t going to work.\u00a0 Or we might have to spin our hardware a couple of extra times to work out the thermal problems by trial and error.\u00a0 That would probably make us late to market.\u00a0 And late means no customers again.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Either way, no customers, no bottom line.<\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe we could get away with outsourcing the thermal work.\u00a0 All we’d have to do is make sure that high-priced consultant is there from Day One to advise the board designers, the chassis designers, and whoever will put together our cooling system, so that all the little thermal issues can be ironed out as the design process goes along.\u00a0 If you just bring him in at the last minute, he will find all our thermal problems all right, and then he’d send us back to Square One to re-design everything to fix them.\u00a0 The days of just slapping on a heat sink or a fan are long gone.\u00a0 Thermal design has to be integrated into the hardware design process, or we don’t have a hardware design process.\u00a0 It is actually cheaper and faster to have the thermal engineer in house, working with the other engineers on a daily basis.\u00a0 Faster and cheaper than doing the whole thing over, that is.<\/em><\/p>\n

Faster to market.\u00a0 Cheaper.\u00a0 Isn’t that the bottom line?<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely, <\/em>
\n Your heat-sink-pickin’, fan-slappin’ thermal engineer<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If your company is going to have a future, it will have to make use of the electronic components of the future.\u00a0 And those components will require expert thermal design to keep them from burning up.\u00a0 Thermal engineers won’t knock a mere 2% off the cost of an electronic assembly.\u00a0 They will provide an enabling technology for the electronics of the future.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t Everything He Knows Wrong, Too?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The straight dope on Tony Kordyban<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Tony Kordyban has been an engineer in the field of electronics cooling for different telecom and power supply companies (who can keep track when they change names so frequently?) for the last twenty years.\u00a0 Maybe that doesn\u2019t make him an expert in heat transfer theory, but it has certainly gained him a lot of experience in the ways NOT to\u00a0cool electronics.\u00a0 He does have some book-learnin\u2019, with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Detroit (motto:Detroit\u2014 no place for wimps) and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford (motto: shouldn\u2019t Nobels count more than Rose Bowls?)<\/p>\n

In those twenty years Tony has come to the conclusion that a lot of the common practices of electronics cooling are full of baloney.\u00a0 He has run into so much nonsense in the field that he has found it easier to just assume \u201ceverything you know is wrong\u201d (from the comedy album by Firesign Theatre), and to question everything against the basic principles of heat transfer theory.<\/p>\n

Tony has been collecting case studies of the wrong way to cool electronics, using them to educate the cooling masses, applying humor as the sugar to help the medicine go down.\u00a0 These have been published recently by the ASME Press in a book called, \u201cHot Air Rises and Heat Sinks:\u00a0 Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong.\u201d\u00a0 It is available direct from ASME Press at 1-800-843-2763 or at their web site at\u00a0http:\/\/www.asme.org\/pubs\/asmepress<\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Order Number 800741.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Answers to those Doggone Thermal Design Questions By Tony Kordyban Copyright by Tony Kordyban 2001   Dear Doggone Thermal Guy, Our company is a giant manufacturer of specialty sportswear fabrics and lenses for automotive taillights (the ones that smash so easily when a grocery cart taps them in the parking lot).\u00a0 We recently entered the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-311","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":320,"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311\/revisions\/320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tonykordyban.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}