Heatsink radiation as a function of geometry

In today's high performance computers the need to cool the CPU and other VLSI devices with attached heatsinks is very common. The heatsink geometry is usually driven by the thermal requirements in conjunction with the device packaging needs. As the processor speeds increase the die power dissipation also increases, leading to an increase in the preferred heatsink size. In this paper the variations in the radiation characteristics of heatsinks are examined with respect to their geometries by use of a three dimensional finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique.<>