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Article: Heat, temperature and embedded resistors.(Embedded Passives Update)
- Article from:
- CircuiTree
- Article date:
- July 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 BNP Media. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In Houston they say "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." For electronic systems, it's not the heat, it's the temperature. Components make heat, heat makes temperature, and temperature makes failures. When do we need to be concerned about this for embedded passives? From the component point of view, capacitors and inductors are designed to have very low losses, so they make little heat and would rarely be a problem. But resistors, embedded or discrete, may need to get rid of 100's of mW of heat, and temperature is how they push it away. There is little problem in battery-driven handheld devices such as cell phones and PDAs; their low-power designs preclude these issues, ...