New flavour, cool taste
How designers are staying cool by developing a taste for metal substrates that remove heat from pcb mounted leds. By Mike Richardson.
As power density increases, designers are increasingly faced with the challenge of either getting more power out of the same footprint or making the devices smaller, which can lead to a demand for improved thermal performance.
But the burning question is why thermal management has suddenly become such a hot topic for electronic components? The answer lies with the extraordinary growth of power leds in many new lighting applications. Designers are now exploring the development of thermal substrate technologies that provide enhanced performance for surface mount leds and associated drive electronics through a marked increase in reliability. After all, the cooler you maintain the operating temperature of electronic components, the more reliable they are and the longer their lifecycle will be.
