New Paradigms in Electronics Cooling Engineering

As targets for future growth of aluminum products, we sees greatest opportunity in the three areas of automotive, energy and electronics. Within electronics, uses of aluminum include capacitor materials, magnetic disk substrates, printer/copier drums, and heatsinks. Of the first three areas, other materials may soon replace aluminum. In heatsinks, the high thermal conductivity, low density and low material cost of aluminum preclued serious competition from other materials. Cooling technology for modern servers, workstations and desktop computers has just begun a period of rapid change. As processor powers approach 100 watts, longstanding limits on air cooling are being challenged. The most recent changes are in the heatsinks themselves, as the longstanding manufacturing process of extruding is no longer capable of meeting new performance requirements. Skiving and folded fins, both established manufacturing technologies which can provide much finer features than extruding, are leading candidates for mass production of the new generation of heatsinks. This study focuses on the history of evolution of an effective organization for bringing the new heatsink technologies to market, concentrating on development of a start-up unit within a large metals company and a host of relationships, both technical and business, outside the company. Metals companies have long been accustomed to the necessity of constant innovation. In Japan, which has negligible ore resources, all value added is found in processing and uniqueness of the product. As metals companies have made the transition from a supplier of various aluminum alloys in traditional form factors (rod, sheet, foil, etc.) to custom made-to-order products, the next transformation has begun. Heatsinks fall into the vague category of a semi-custom product — each customer has almost the same requirements, with slightly different exceptions to a standard part. Additionally, a product lifetime may be measured in months rather than years. The computer market is dominated by large players but the size distribution tails off very slowly. 51% of the market is held by 6 companies, the largest with 14%. The remaining 49% features a wide distribution of market share and technical capabilities. This results in some customers with large staffs specializing in cooling technology, others with a small number (sometimes 1) of multidisciplinary mechanical/thermal engineers, and others with no engineering staff other than system integrators. In order to address this wide and rapidly moving market, we have made alliances with makers of other electronics cooling components (fans, plastic housings, thermal interface materials), jointly developed products with computer and processor makers, and co-sponsored university research. This year (2000) saw a large-scale entry into the Gigahertz processor cooling market, with a focus on high level visibility at technical conferences and trade shows. As thermal concerns move from a final step in the design cycle to a initial consideration, educating customers about the potential contributions of the new heatsink technologies has become a major effort in our technical marketing campaign.