Fried egg proves case for thermal management: News from Flomerics

Note: A free brochure or catalogue is available from Flomerics on the products in this news release. Click here to request a copy.

A novel independent experiment has proved what most of us have known for years - egg and chips go together perfectly. The phrase "it's so hot you could fry an egg on it" has been applied to pavements, car bonnets and even sunburnt bodies. Now computer chips can join the list of possible places to cook yourself a tasty snack.

Using just a piece of tinfoil, some copper pennies and a computer running a standard 1500MHz microprocessor, 'tekhead' Trubador has successfully fried an egg in only 11min - not too poor for a machine designed to crunch data rather than provide breakfast.

Although intended as a piece of fun, this experiment underlines the serious implications of the thermal issues that Flomerics' believes will become the limiting factor within chip design in the near future.

Using bronze pennies to replace the original heatsink, Trubador generated enough heat to cook the egg.

These minor modifications demonstrate the enormous heat loading CPUs are under and why Flomerics' thermal analysis software, Flotherm, has become so widely used throughout the electronics industry.

Developed in the 1970s by Intel founder Gordon Moore, Moore's law predicts that the densities of transistors in chips will double each year.

This remains largely true today, with exponential increases in transistor densities and simultaneously, power usage.

This has lead to huge increases in heat loadings on systems.

For example, in the last six years the average heat output of a server rack has risen from 1kW to over 12kW.

This trend will continue and as a result thermal issues will become the limiting factor in the reliability and performance increases of future computer systems.

Although thermal management issues will affect high-end microchips before other areas of the electronics marketplace, the problem is not limited to just this sector of the industry.

As miniaturisation continues to sweep through all consumer sectors, more and more companies, from mobile phone manufacturers to military hardware providers, are encountering heat-related reliability issues and looking to solve them with Flomerics' 12 years' experience in electronics cooling.

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News Release from: Flomerics
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 26 September 2002

Fried egg proves case for thermal management

With CPUs already hot enough to fry eggs, Flomerics' predicts that thermal issues will become the limiting factor within Moore's law of chip speed gains.

Note: A free brochure or catalogue is available from Flomerics on the products in this news release. Click here to request a copy.

News Release from: Flomerics Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 26 September 2002

Fried egg proves case for thermal management

With CPUs already hot enough to fry eggs, Flomerics' predicts that thermal issues will become the limiting factor within Moore's law of chip speed gains.

Note: A free brochure or catalogue is available from Flomerics on the products in this news release. Click here to request a copy.

News Release from: Flomerics
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 26 September 2002