The ATE (Automatic Test Equipment) market for semiconductor test is moving quickly toward higher performance and higher parallelism, while at the same time Teradyne is leading the market in smaller, space-efficient test cells. Board power densities are therefore increasing and pushing the air cooling envelope ever farther.

For Teradyne's next generation ATE memory tester, Coolit was utilized early in the design phase to assure that aggressive junction temperature goals could be met with traditional air cooling technologies and to perform design optimization studies.

Shown is a Coolit model of a PC assembly that dissipates over 800 watts. The model was created in just a few days, and included enough detail to predict case temperatures for all critical components.

A typical 582,000 grid cell case converged in 187 iterations and 9.3 hours on a Pentium II 300 MHz computer with 192 Mb of memory.

Once the model was created, the software's easy to use interface allowed engineers to quickly and easily modify thermal parameters such as airflow, heatsink materials, fin pitch and thickness, and interface conductivity. Coolit allowed Teradyne's engineers to design and optimize a thermal management system for a new product long before hardware was available.