Investigation of a novel heat dissipation concept with controllable thermal and EM performance for reliable electronics and communication systems

This paper presents a novel efficient heat dissipation concept in electronics with switch controllable thermal and electromagnetic (EM) performance. Besides the traditional implementation of heatsinks on the back of the antenna in communication systems, a passive technique by introducing a reconfigurable heatsink that reuses the air space above the antenna for additional heat dissipation channels is proposed. The non-contact heatsink is lifted with a tiny air gap from the antenna and partially connected with the antenna through physical switches/poles that balance the EM performance and heat dissipation efficiency, which eliminates the negative impact of the heatsink on the antenna EM performance. EM effects of heatsink on the antenna in terms of locations of contacts, states of switches, and various dimensions are thoroughly investigated. To demonstrate the design efficacy for optimized thermal efficiency and EM performance, a properly designed heatsink is implemented on the top of a simple patch antenna. The measured results show that good heat dissipation is achieved without deteriorating the EM performance of the antenna, in respect to return loss, gain, and radiation patterns. When the switches are OFF and ON, the reflection coefficient of the antenna is measured as −20.82 dB and −17.56 dB, respectively. In addition, with a 20 mW heat source at the input port of the antenna to mimic the heat generation from the electronics, the temperature of the antenna surface is reduced with the front-integrated heatsink by 7.4 °C and 13.4 °C when the connection switches are turned OFF and ON. The implementation of the front-integrated heatsink on the antenna fully demonstrates the proposed heat dissipation concept which provides an effective way to solve the tradeoff between thermal inefficiency and EM performance.