Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
Written by John Keller
Thermal management technology for high-performance embedded computing — or the need to cool or sometimes heat components to keep them within their stated performance parameters — can be slow-moving and sometimes a design afterthought. There are exceptions, however, and over the past year, those changes have involved liquid cooling.
Removing excess heat from electronics components like central processing units (CPUs), data converters, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), and some optical interconnects today is falling into the realm of liquid cooling, where only a few years ago this approach widely was considered exotic, expensive, risky, and out of bounds for most applications.
Today it’s different. “Liquid cooling is more accessible today,” says Jim Shaw, executive vice president of engineering at rugged computing specialist Crystal Group Inc. in Hiawatha, Iowa. “The whole industry is gaining much more experience in liquid cooling; it’s not just the F-35. It’s becoming more widely used, and we are getting better at it.”
The military embedded computing industry today is seeing explosive growth in liquid cooling — particularly the approach of getting liquid into the cold plate itself with quick disconnects, says Shaun McQuaid, director of product manager at Mercury Systems in Andover, Mass. “It is so much more efficient to cool with liquid — if you have liquid available,” McQuaid says.
Despite the growing popularity, affordability, and reliability of liquid cooling, however, many other thermal management techniques are available to remove the ever-growing amount of heat generated in high-performance embedded computing systems. These techniques range from traditional conduction and convection cooling to hybrid approaches that blend conduction and convection cooling, new heat-transfer materials, custom approaches, and good old-fashioned engineering to make the most of heat transfer in advanced computing architectures.
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