BORA SOM/BORA Hardware/Electrical Thermal management and heat dissipation

History
Issue Date	Notes
2021/10/29	New documentation layout
2025/10/29	Add termography pictures

Thermal management

Bora product is designed to support the maximum available temperature range declared by the manufacturer. The customer shall define and conduct a reasonable number of tests and verification in order to qualify the DUT capabilities to manage the heat dissipation.

For example, in the previous test cases:

• Testbed 1 : when Tamb has been set to +85°C, the Bora SOM has been coupled to a passive heat sink to prevent exceeding maximum Zynq's junction temperature
• Testbed 2 : when Tamb has been set to +75°C, the Bora SOM has been coupled to a fan-cooled heat sink to prevent exceeding maximum Zynq's junction temperature

Any heatsink, fan etc shall be defined case by case depending on the various use conditions like: air cooling (forced or not), enclosure dimensions, mechanical/thermal coupling with heatsink. A proper thermal analysis must be investigated on the real use scenario which depends on FPGA design, frequency configurations, working signals, etc.

DAVE Embedded Systems' team is available for any additional information, please contact sales@dave.eu.

SOM Thermography

The following images are taken in stress test conditions (with 2 CPU burn running and ethernet iperf) without any heatsink in order to highlight the hot spots on this board. The hottest spots are:

• the CPU
• the PSU stages
• the Ethernet PHY (iperf test was enabled during this test)

Depending on your application, it may be necessary to dissipate heat not only from the CPU but also from other areas (the thermal analysis is important in conjunction with the SOM temperature range).

CPU max 68°C

CPU max 47°C

PSU stages max 50°C

Ethernet PHY max 53°C