It's nearly impossible to use power efficiently enough to eliminate waste heat altogether. Enhancing efficiency can help reduce waste heat -- but only to a degree.

Embedded computing designers squeeze the most out of conduction, convection, and liquid cooling, and look to the future of disaggregated architectures and 3D printing.

Military-display designers continue to face stringent size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints while integrating commercial innovations like HD – and soon 4K – into systems that must work with legacy sensors and interfaces while also complying with a variety of open architectures and standards.

Today’s modern warfighters have grown up with smartphones and tablets with intuitive, multitouch projected capacitive (PCAP) touch screens. They rely heavily on these devices in their personal lives and they expect to have access to the same capabilities and conveniences in the field.

High data throughput and innovative thermal management may lead to a revolution in systems design that places the burden of electronics cooling on the enclosure more than on the card.

Ivan Straznicky talks about the challenges of keeping rugged computer systems designed for military programs cool under harsh conditions as they grow more powerful and more complex.

With faster processors, more functions, and higher bandwidth than ever before, today’s avionics are pushing the cooling technology envelope to the breaking point – and beyond.

Until recently, the use of moving liquid to remove excess heat from embedded computing processors was considered an expensive and unreliable luxury, but escalating demand and maturing technologies finally are putting this technology within reach.