With the increase in the amount of heat dissipation from electronic devices, the use of heat sink has been growing rapidly in the recent years. Today, a heat sink can be found in many domestic and office electronic equipment. Despite thisubiquitous appearance of different types of heat sinks, however, there lacks an industry standard for measuring and reporting the performance of a heat sink. In order to better understand what parameters and issues are involved, a survey has been carriedout to collect information on the experimental methods and techniques that are currently practiced in the industry for measuring the thermal performance of an air-cooled heat sink. Three heat-sink vendors have participated, and this paper reports theresults of the survey. In addition, discussions and conclusions are drawn. As expected, while the methods and definitions employed by each vendor were fundamentally correct within its own experiment, the survey found that the geometric set-ups and otherimportant parametric controls were significantly different between the vendors. It is concluded that, without a standard, it would be difficult and often misleading to compare measurement data obtained and provided by different sources.
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