Factors of Increased Heat Generation in OpenVPX Systems

It's no secret that higher performance means higher thermal management requirements. Denser electronics packed into smaller spaces oftentimes leaves designers with the challenge of finding more creative ways to dissipate the increased amount of heat for conduction-type cooling methods. OpenVPX enables extraordinary leaps in aggregate system bandwidth and processing speeds that mandates new methods to meet the resulting thermal challenges.

OpenVPX has introduced optical and RF signals to the backplane, removing these otherwise discrete connectors from the front of the cards. While the new backplane connections eliminate what would otherwise be a jumble of cables, the aggregate high-speed signals that now traverse the backplane rapidly heat up the system, exacerbating the already difficult-to-manage temperature increases.