Heat Transfer: Thermal Management of Electronics

Book Preface

Design and manufacturing of microelectronic devices and systems are multidisciplinary engineering activities. With the continuous trend toward miniaturization and high power density systems, the dependency between different design disciplines has become even more pronounced. Chip designers, hardware engineers, mechanical engineers, test engineers, reliability engineers, and thermal engineers can no longer work in their own solo environments. They are now expected to interact with each other and ensure that a proposed design from one discipline does not violate the requirements of other disciplines. Some microelectronic companies have gone a step further and looked for multidisciplinary engineers who have knowledge and expertise in multiple design disciplines. These engineers can move the design process through multiple disciplines in parallel, and will reduce the risk of a product being optimized in one aspect while not meeting the requirements of the others.

Thermal engineering is one of the disciplines involved in the design and manufacturing of electronic systems. Appropriate thermal design has become one of the enabling factors for the realization of high power density electronic equipment. In addition to preventing the failures that may result from high temperature, smart and innovative thermal designs will increase the life expectancy of a system; may reduce its emitted acoustic noise, cost, time to market, and energy consumption; and can create significant market differentiations compared to similar products.

I have worked in the field of thermal management of electronics for over 10 years. Most of the mechanical, electrical, hardware, power, and industrial engineers I have worked with have had little to no knowledge of thermal management. I have also been teaching a course on heat transfer in electronics to undergraduate students in electrical and computer engineering majors for over eight years. These students have little or no background in thermodynamics and heat transfer principles. Although there is a general consensus that the engineers who work on the hardware side of the electronic industry will benefit from basic knowledge of thermal engineering, there is no heat transfer book that is written for this group.

The target audience for this book is current and future engineers, with careers in the electronic industry. It educates those engineers on the basics of thermal management of electronics, broadens their engineering knowledge and expertise, and moves them a step closer to being multidisciplinary engineers. It assumes no previous exposure to the sciences of heat transfer and thermodynamics and introduces all the relevant principles accordingly.

This book is structured so that the first seven chapters give readers a basic knowledge of thermal management of electronics such that they will be able to analyze and solve simple electronic cooling problems. Chapters 8 through 13 go into the details of heat transfer fundamentals and may be used by those who are interested in a deeper understanding of the physics of heat transfer. Chapters 14 and 15 discuss computational and experimental methods and tools used in a typical thermal design process. Finally, some advanced cooling techniques are introduced in Chapter 16.