Deggendorf, November 27, 2007 – Thanks to congatec's new and flexible cooling solutions, it's now much easier to keep embedded computer modules cool. These cooling solutions range from simple thermal stacks, to heatspreaders and all the way up to passive and active coolers.
In spite of the fact that the power consumption has not risen as quickly as computing performance, it's still necessary to implement an effective cooling solution for high performance computers. The lifespan of a computer is influenced heavily by its operating temperature. A temperature increase of 20 degrees will reduce the statistical life expectancy by half and therefore a proper cooling solution becomes critical.
Form factor standards such as COM Express™, XTX™ and ETX® already define a thermal coupling interface to the system's cooling solution. All heat generating components, especially chipsets and processors, are dissipating the heat to the system via the heatspreader.
The thermal stacks, which are small metal blocks that bridge the gap between the heat generating components and the cooling solution surface, are available now. When comparing thermal stacks to the complete heatspreader solution, it's apparent that the thermal stack is more efficient due to the fact that there's one less heat transfer surface involved, i.e the heatspreader plate.
Compared to previous solutions whereby the heatsink was mounted on top of the heatspreader, these new cooling solutions are created from a solid block of aluminum. This type of fabrication guarantees faster heat transfer.
The active cooling solution has an integrated powerful and silent fan. No additional airflow is required. Additionally, the congatec Embedded BIOS can utilize the fan's tacho signal in order to implement fan speed control. When using COM Express or XTX modules, temperature dependent fan operation is possible.
All of these cooling solutions have been especially designed for congatec's COM Express™, XTX™ and ETX® embedded computer modules.
