First time cool & right, right?:)

© ASTRON Mechanical Group

Some time ago a multi-pad cooling solution for the Xilinx FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) for the Gemini LRU board for the SKA-LOW correlator was designed by Hiddo Hanenburg.

While Hiddo is enjoying his retirement, I had to take over his role and create a follow-up design. What you see in the picture is a mono-cool block design resting on the Gemini LRU board which has to cool all the major components and the substantial part of the PCB. The mono-block design started at the end of January and now (the end of February) it has already been 1.5 weeks in production at ASTRON's Research Instrument-Workshop, in the good hands of Sjouke Kuindersma.

As mono & cool as the screenshot seems, the more exciting it is for me because it is my very first cool-baby. First time right, right? :)), first bigger aluminum milled part (oh well, I do not count the RFoF in-house production tool . because it was only a tool, and it was tiny, this is a substantially bigger babe (yay!)).

The block will be prepared for fitting and testing, and made ready for the CDR in Manchester in March.

High Performance Computing, here we come! Let's cool! :D