Over the last few years, evolving expectations in enterprise have driven unprecedented development in both electronics and IT equipment. Increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, along with the integration of cloud systems, new technologies, and employment practices have played a major role in shaping modern electronics trends.
As a result, today’s devices need to be more robust, reliable, and powerful than ever before.
In a recent panel discussion, organized by thermal simulation company Future Facilities, design engineers and thermal professionals were brought together from across all sectors to discuss the impact of these trends on the future of electronics design.
These industry experts agreed that the trend towards smaller, more powerful devices is making optimum power, performance, and temperature difficult to attain. Design engineers now face the complex challenge of placing ever more powerful components into increasingly compact chassis without compromising reliability, usability, or longevity.
Predicting Power Consumption
Devices that generate more power also generate more heat. So, for engineers, the focus is on how to meet the rising power requirements of the market while keeping their designs cool.
But, one of the biggest problems for manufacturers trying to strike such a delicate balance is that they’re not able to predict, with any degree of certainty, the power consumption and operating environment (including temperature limits) of a final product.
This means that design engineers need to consider the history of the device, or similar devices, to ensure that the cooling technique being employed is suitable for multiple configurations. It also requires engineers to think about the thermal optimization of their designs as far in advance of a product’s launch date as possible, with thermal management and simulation playing an increasingly important role in the reliability of device operations and end-of-life aspects of the design.
Shaping Industry Trends
When it comes to the technologies that are shaping trends in the electronics industry, those in Future Facilities’ panel believed AI, IoT, and edge computing to be hugely influential in driving the design and development of devices in future.
AI, and its subsets, like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), are set to shape a wide variety of future industry trends, both at the chip level and in terms of the end products being produced.
At the chip level, AI is fueling an arms race for new hardware. For manufacturers, this means constantly competing to develop products that can meet the evolving demands of the market. But in this fast-paced environment, there’s a greater risk for thermal complexities to be overlooked.
Experts and professionals within the industry are seeing a rapid rate of change over a short period of time. For example, for those working with data centers, AI is creating major change in regard to data and storage capabilities. As both the volume and complexity of the data being analyzed and processed increases, data centers have been forced to adopt increasingly powerful servers and deploy ever more intricate cooling systems, such as liquid and immersion-cooling servers.
Data and Design of IoT Devices
The IoT and IoT-enabled devices will be a major source of data traffic for AI systems and solutions. But the IoT will itself bring its own unique set of thermal challenges.
Due to the wide variety of devices, applications, and environments that are being designed with the IoT in mind, electronics will need to be incorporated into a range of industrial and environmental settings. This means that design engineers will have to focus heavily on making devices that are powerful, light, portable, and compact, but also highly durable and reliable—a complex combination from a thermal perspective.
The major thermal challenge for the IoT, as identified by the experts on Future Facilities’ panel, is that of developing and designing electronics for brand new environments. Rather than manufacturing a product that will be housed in a stable setting—one that is fixed, managed, and relatively unchanging, such as a factory floor—new IoT devices will be exposed to the elements of the physical world.
The potential exposure to an ever-changing range of temperature fluctuations will require devices that can perform in harsh environments. And, this means that thermal designs will have to operate under a very high ambient temperature, high humidity, and temperature cycling. All of which will cause reliability issues. So, the thermal industry will need game-changing developments where IoT is concerned.
To overcome this challenge, what’s needed is a combination of more advanced thermal modelling and simulation tools (capable of emulating atmospheric fluctuations), combined with newer thermal management techniques, such as full immersion cooling for devices in rugged conditions.
The Role of Edge Computing
As the growth of the IoT and IoT devices gathers pace, edge computing will become critical to information management and the wider infrastructure of the new, interconnected world. The reason for this: edge computing allows data to be processed and managed closer to the end user and the source of its creation.
When data is processed at the network’s edge, as opposed to in the cloud or at an enterprise data center, it can be managed, analyzed, and actioned faster to improve response times and the user experience. This makes it ideal for IoT devices, where information must often be processed in real time at the device level.
The emergence and expansion of edge computing, however, raises the minimum requirements for operation, maintenance and uptime, which has led to a rethink on data center operations at the edge of the network. As with the IoT, moving data to the edge of the network means sophisticated IT equipment usually housed in expensive data centers will now be out in the ‘real world’, bringing a host of environmental thermal considerations.
While those within the industry don’t expect to see edge computing replace data centers, what is likely to happen is that we will see the creation of micro-data centers that support the IoT alongside the roll out of other new connection technologies, such as 5G.
The Need for Thermal Simulation in IT
As new technologies and trends continue to shape the design of electronics within the IT industry, engineers will have to rise to the thermal challenges that come with manufacturing lighter, thinner designs optimized for 5G, AI, IoT, and edge computing.
Faced with these new demands, design engineers need increasingly advanced thermal simulation tools that deliver accurate results on complicated design models in limited time frames.
Whether it’s the simulation of heat within an electronic device or tackling the thermal properties of a data center, the onus is on design engineers to find solutions that can turn today’s design trends into tomorrow’s device realities. Thermal simulation tools that provide accurate, reliable insights into how products can be streamlined and improved will lie at the heart of this process.
The market demand is for electronics that are fully optimized for new technologies and can reliably operate in a wide variety of environments: whether it’s developing the latest high-powered AI hardware, a 5G edge-base station, or the next high-performance cloud computing solution. The burden is now on design engineers to deliver.
The companies that can perfect and optimize their designs will be best placed to claim the market lead. And, being able to find solutions to thermal issues early on in the design process will be essential to getting ahead, and staying ahead, of the competition.
