Jukka Rantala

How well can we assess thermally driven reliability issues in electronic systems today? Summary of panel held at the Therminic 2002

A panel was organized at the Therminic 2002 workshop to address the question posed in the title of this summary paper. Brief presentations were made by the six panelists, followed by an open discussion among Workshop participants. The focus of the panel was on reliability, not performance, and on systems, not parts. While the panel recognized the availability of various specialized analytical tools at a handful of leading research institutions and with expert individuals, it was felt that the industry at large is still transitioning from the use of simple thermal design rules to a more detailed physics based methodology. The current state-of-the-art of thermal metrology was outlined. An overview of the temperature-reliability relationships at the component and system levels was provided. Some of the emerging thermal challenges associated with the evolution of three-dimensional on-chip interconnect architectures were identified. The role of uncertainty analysis in predictions was emphasized. A primary conclusion was to focus on the prediction of thermally influenced risks in current and future products, based on a sound physics based approach.

Challenges in thermal modeling of electronics at the system level: summary of panel held at the Therminic 2000

The rapidly shrinking times-to market for modern electronic products are requiring high fidelity system level thermal simulations. Electronic products are characterized by diverse length scales of interest, multiple coupled modes of thermal transport, and presence of multiple flow regimes. Numerous materials and interfaces are utilized in these systems, often displaying highly anisotropic behavior. Thermal management devices such as fans and heat sinks also result in unique challenges in system level thermal modeling. While a number of advances in computational modeling have been made in the past decade, key challenges remain before systems level simulations can be considered truly predictive and can be performed in reasonable time. At the Therminic 2000 a panel was held to identify the key challenges facing the thermal community in the area of system level simulations. Participants from industry and academia focused on gaps in the state-of-the-art in system level thermal/fluidic modeling, and possible ways of addressing these.

Infrared thermography in electronics applications

Thermal engineering of electronics products has become more essential, mainly because of increasing power densities due to the past rate of miniaturization at all assembly levels. One tool, which facilitates this challenging work, is infrared (IR) thermography. With an IR camera, it is often quite easy to quickly inspect an electronic device, or usually printed circuit board (PCB), by detecting and locating possible hot spots. However, due to the relative ease of use of modern IR cameras equipped with diverse special functions, it is also rather easy to make serious misinterpretations. Typical pitfalls that arise in electronics applications include considerable emissivity variations, for instance on common PCBs and the sometimes-drastic changes of operation conditions when the device under test is removed from its operational environment to allow imaging. In this paper, these pitfalls, their effects, and the feasibility of possible remedies are discussed.

Opportunities and challenges for telecommunications technology

Summary form only given. The telecommunications industry is currently in a position where long-awaited third generation technologies and services are coming into commercial use. This presentation discusses the opportunities and challenges related to this, and also gives a review of developments in the last five years. With the increase in the number of mobile phone users, another remarkable change in telecommunications has been the increase of broadband Internet connections. Together these two show good promise for the success of third generation mobile services. Services are expected to be the most rapidly growing business type, and here multimedia applications provide new ways for customers to exploit mobility. Both in developing areas and in industrial countries, the success of the technology is related to how open standards can be developed, so that all services are interoperable.