Don’t Lose Your Cool: Important Ways to Approach Heat Management

When you watch a movie on your laptop, the fan almost immediately starts to sound like a jet engine, and feels warm enough to start a fire. If you leave your smartphone in the glove box in the summer, it won’t work until it cools down. Keeping electronics a reasonable temperature is not magic, although it may feel like it at times as the rules and situations are not very familiar to electrical engineers. The effects of heat on electronics are also somewhat difficult to predict and often can be better understood using statistics, such as mean time between failures to show the lifetime averages.