Thermal evaluation of a PowerPC 620 multi-processor computer

Passive heat sinks for cooling the PowerPC 620 processor in a multi-processor computer system were analyzed. A Computational Fluid Dynamics software program was used to determine the airflow and air temperatures at the system and board levels. A heat sink was chosen based on estimated thermal requirements and then characterized experimentally under similar flow and geometry conditions found in the system. Data from the simulation and experiments was then combined to calculate junction temperature. Results show the junction temperature can be maintained below 85/spl deg/C for a 25 Watt processor and 100/spl deg/C for a 30 Watt processor.