Thermal Characterization of Passive Cooling Techniques for High-Power Component Clusters

One of the most significant reasons for thermal defects in electronic systems is having high temperature areas on an electronic printed circuit board caused by multiple heat sources placed in a cluster. The current research focuses on characterizing thermally two possibilities of cooling such areas, one by employing individual heat sinks for each component in the cluster and another with having one heat sink to dissipate the temperature from all components at once. It has been shown that using individual heat sinks for each component has a significant impact on the overall temperature of the system, reducing the temperature with approximately 20 °C, in steady-state conditions. Individual heat sinks can be integrated in all electronic systems where high-power component clusters are used.