Comparative Analysis of Intel Pentium 4 and IEEE/EMC TC-9/ACEM CPU Heat Sinks

This paper presents finite element frequency domain results for electromagnetic radiation emitted from high power microelectronic circuits connected to a heat sink. The heat sink model associated with one of the IEEE EMC TC-9 challenging problems, 2000-4 CPU heat sink, has been used to investigate different grounding configurations. A new simulation model for the Intel P4 CPU heat sink is proposed. In contrast to the 2000-4 EMC challenging model, Intel P4 CPU heat sink model exhibited different results. A resonant frequency of 2.6 GHz with a reflection coefficient of -8.3 dB was found for the Intel P4 CPU heat sink, which is close to the operating frequency of 2.4 GHz for IEEE and Bluetooth wireless communication systems. The comparison of frequency sweeping results shows that the reflection coefficient was found to be -16 dB at 3.6 GHz and -20 dB at 3.4 GHz from conventional CPU heat sink. The CPU heat sink can perform as an efficient radiator at these frequencies.