August 22, 2012 – ACT Expands Performance of VME/VPX Cards with High Conductivity Spreaders
Advanced Cooling Technologies Inc. (ACT) announces key developments in their embedded computing cooling products. For the past several years, ACT has been providing mission critical thermal solutions for VME, VPX, ATR and other embedded computing cards and chassis’ used in military and industrial environments. Recent trends have shown an increased need for heat spreading due to higher per card power requirements. With this in mind, ACT has developed thinner and more capable heat spreaders.
ACT’s embedded heat pipe spreaders also termed HiK Plates, conform to all critical VITA standards for embedded computing cards and have thermal conductivity greatly exceeding aluminum or copper. ACT’s HiK conduction cards for VME and VPX applications have demonstrated effective thermal conductivities between 500 W/m-K and 1,000 W/m-K depending on the configuration. ACT’s ultra-thin HiK heat spreaders can be manufactured as thin as 1.8mm diameter creating a viable thermal solution for weight and space limited applications.
Heat pipes utilize liquid to vapor phase change to achieve very efficient heat transport. They can be bent and flattened into thin plates, allowing heat to be moved directly from the source components to the heat sink. Working closely with our customers’ engineers, we design optimum thermal solutions resulting in light weight, cost effective products with little or no impact on existing geometries.
In most embedded computing applications, a few high power components such as CPU(s), FPGA(s) and RF amplifiers create the majority of the thermal load on densely populated boards. Thermal limitations can negatively impact the performance of these critical card/rack components.
ACT’s HiK spreaders increase the allowable power of key components by efficiently transferring heat from the components to the edge of the card. In addition, heat pipes spread heat uniformly along the card edge, creating better heat transfer through the wedge lock and into the chassis. This dual benefit of efficiently pulling heat away from high flux devices and isothermalizing the edge of the card significantly reduces junction temperatures and minimizes the impact of the thermal choke point typically associated with wedge lock connections.