An Advanced Fan-less AIoT Smart Edge Gateway with Thickness Thermal Pad Design

In the era of IoT (Internet of Everything), as an extension of cloud infrastructure, on-demand computing and storage resources are deployed in a distributed way at the edge side that is close to end-users or end devices for the emerging applications. Considering fulfillment of cross segments of telco, industrial networking, enterprise, and deployment of cloud service, edge environments are more various and complicated than data center environments. Recently, the trend of putting inference at edge drives more computing and storage resources converged in edge devices, which is a challenge for fan-less intelligent IoT compact size devices deployed in extended temperature (-25~+65 °C) edge environments.In this paper, an advanced fan-less AIoT (Artificial Intelligence & Internet of Things) is introduced. It is a smart edge gateway compact size design. In AIoT device, the novel thermal pad patterns with various materials which are designed for a heat exchanger of GPU (Graphic Processing Unit), Wi-Fi, 5G, SSD (Solid-state disk), and DDR4 (Double-Data-Rate Fourth Generation) modules are detail explored and analyzed based on multiple dimensional thermal simulation models, lab experiment validation as well as pilot deployment results in -25~+65 °C extended temperature edge environments. Moreover, this paper also proved that the new heat pad mode using various materials in the advanced fan-less AIoT intelligent edge gateway can meet the cooling requirements of different system configurations with many advantages such as higher thermal efficiency, improved system performance, and simplified chassis design and so on. The best-known design methods and practices of engineering work are also summarized in the paper, including heat dissipation efficiency of thermal pad material, the height of add-on module and its PCB (Printed Circuit Board) bending characteristics, surface heat dissipation coefficient as well as life cycle and reliability.