A minimum specification of air-cooling with layout design by efficient optimization scheme for outline design stage

Until now, layout design of high-end electronics system has been driven primarily by electrical requirements, e.g., mainframe computer and super computer. In the near future, however, due to increasing thermal density, we also expect a need for a method of thermal layout design. This need is driven by the fact that cooling structures currently used in high-density packaging are rapidly approaching their limits, e.g., personal digital assistants (PDA) and cellular phone. As the result, large feedback loop of the design from thermal detail design to outline design was occurred on high performance mobile terminal design. The cause was that the device layout is decided by only the viewpoint of circuit design on outline design stage. Then, the outline thermal layout design method has been needed. And, we cannot calculate easily the minimum specification of air-cooling for satisfying the system specification within short time. For this purpose, we had developed the first order analysis method based on modularized rough model (Iwata et al., 2002). In this report, and the outline design method of device layout and thermal management based on boundary conditions between modules. For example, we performed a device layout and thermal management design of a board with 4 device modules mounted on top with 16 design variables. Our outline design method is only 15min for taking the minimum specification of air-cooling and the device layout.