System-level thermal management and concurrent system design of a wearable multicomputer system

This paper describes the concurrent system design and thermal management of the Navigator2 which is used as a computerized maintenance manual far aircraft inspection with speech recognition capabilities. The Navigator2 is a wearable computer that includes a novel dual architecture, spread spectrum radio, and VGA head-mounted display. The semi-custom electronic design includes two electronic boards-a custom-designed system board and a 486-based processor board. The system board captures glue logic functions and provides support for two PCMCIA slots, a power management microcontroller, memory backup batteries, and a power supply. The thermal design of the Navigator2 develops concurrently with the overall design in a series of stages. A framework of concurrent thermal engineering consisting of three basic stages is used to maintain interdisciplinary interaction while satisfying thermal design goals