>>On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:52:06 -0700) it happened John Larkin
>><jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in
>><urue84dk5os9eiihvr5d990o7lvhl7q...@4ax.com>:

>>>Cost about $10K, and worth it. I think some new technologies are
>>>coming on board, so prices will drop.

>>>In that second pic I posted, we thought that the FPGA (under the blue
>>>heat sink) was getting too hot as clock frequency increased, so we
>>>were looking into clock gating and tedious stuff like that. A few
>>>minutes with the Flir showed that the dacs (the white-hot blobs) are
>>>in fact heating the FPGA.

>>>John
>>Xcuse me, but would not a finger test show that too? That teh DACS were much
>>hotter then the FPGA?
>>I am not against modern tech, but 10k is a lot of money for something you
>>can also do with a temp probe or your finger.
>>;-)

>Consider a series of images, of the whole board and of regions, taken
>at different clock rates. That tells us, very quickly, where the power
>is going, and sometimes it's unexpected. It's very hard to quantify,
>or even feel, the temperature of an 0603 resistor or a SOT-23 opamp,
>and one board can have hundreds. If you stick a thermocouple to a
>small part, you suck all the heat away. And the simple IR thermometers
>have rotten spatial resolution.

>One of our VME boards can sell for more than the Flir cost. It's been
>a great tool, sort of an instant thermal design review.

>It's also cool for troubleshooting. Suppose a power rail is collapsed.
>You can often image the board and find the part that's hogging the
>power. Or add another power supply, force a few amps, and image the
>traces.

>And with the tax considerations, the net price is about half.

>John