Cooling NI Single-Board RIO Systems

Updated Mar 18, 2020

Overview

NI Single-Board RIO systems provide system engineers with the freedom to develop custom embedded solutions targeted to their specific needs. With this design freedom comes the challenge of determining what maximum ambient temperature a system may operate within, while still operating within the maximum local ambient around the circuit board and maximum case or junction temperature of critical components on the circuit card assembly.

Because of challenges meeting the thermal requirements of newer processors and FPGA's, system designers need to understand how to develop embedded single-board systems for their environment and have a degree of certainty knowing it will meet the thermal constraints when deployed. Different environmental and design factors can make this particularly challenging in still air (natural convection) environments or within sealed enclosures, even with today's lower power processors and FPGA's.

The objective of the attached PDFs is to discuss some of the environmental and design factors that can impact the thermal performance of an NI Single-Board RIO system, and provide a few reference design examples that empirically demonstrate the impact with some common system configurations.