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Welcome to pcb-update vol. 11 – July / August 2010

July and August, the two hottest month's of the year are over us and with them the summer
holiday season starts for real, all we long for is sand, sea and the sun. The warmer the better some says while others say warm but tempered will do.

When it comes to electronics it is the latter that applies. Warm is perfect, hot might make it, but if the PCB board starts to overheat, you will get into all sorts of trouble before you know of it.
Everything from occasional failures which are the worst to detect, to more consequent fallouts and even complete melt downs can happen. Too much heat is a real time problem and it becomes more dominant as devices get's faster, real estate gets smaller and the working conditions under which the product has to perform get's tougher.

Overheating designs can be expensive in many ways. If the product fails the test before it is launched there is the cost of redesign. If the product is out and starts to fail occasionally, the cost of trouble shooting raises dramatically. And when overheating cost lives …...

But how can you protect yourself against overheating?

Well the short answer is simulation and foresight. Consequent fallouts and melt downs are relatively easy to troubleshoot, but when failure is caused by occasional overheating one or two degrees above the expected, it can be very difficult to find the source of the problem, as the source of the overheating can occur both from the layout of the board if the power distribution of the design is not correct or the cooling of the environment of the PCB such as insufficient airflow around the design etc. But you also have to take the working environment in which the final product will be placed into consideration. Even a well cooled product can get into trouble if it is placed in a boiling engine room where there is no ventilation to aid the products internal cooling system. It is just like yourself, you might be in tip top shape, but placed in a overheated office with a stressing deadline your performance is likely to drop.

Proper power distribution and cooling are key elements in a successful design and the more you know about how to control these parameters, the better you are prepared to deal with them.

Articles of the month

As this is a double issue there are two articles for you to read this month. One about thermal analysis and one about the value of correct Power distribution.

Article 1: Software simulation of double sided PCB is a whitepaper written by Edward Iwamiya of Carent Corporation in California and found on the Mentor graphics website. This paper covers the cooling from conceptual design through detailed component analysis of predicting junction temperatures of critical components­­­­­­. It is educational, interesting and guaranteed to cool your design down. Click here

Article 2: “SeaMicro is Dazzled with HyperLynx PI Performance” is more a case study describing the challenges SeaMicro faced building a new web server. SeaMicro is known to cut no corners an only want the best performance possible on their gear and hesitantly had to turn to the use of analysis software to overcome their problems. After the success was in house, they have adopted the software to be part of all new designs. Follow this link and read about the challenge SeaMicro had and learn how they cured their problem. Click here

I hope these two articles will cool down your summer to a pleasing level and will return with more inspirational reading in September.

Mike Dyrberg
pcb-update.com^®