Last Monday was the second hottest day on record in Edmonton, and many of my iPhone 3G apps refused to function, opening and then closing right up again. For awhile, when I was sweltering most from the heat, the phone shut down and refused to restart, leaving me without connection to the Internet. That night people went to bed early in protest. Having planned to make a night of it at the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival, we cut the evening short and returned home.
The incident reminded me that temperature matters. Heat directly affects computers and Internet devices. Each computer chip has a maximum temperature not to be exceeded. Operating a CPU above the maximum admissible temperature leads to computer malfunction, with symptoms including random freezes, random resets, and eventually CPU burnout.
A number of interesting approaches have been employed for the cooling of ever larger and faster computers. By welding an open pipe onto a heat sink and insulating the pipe, for instance, it is possible to cool a CPU with liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature below -196°C. After the nitrogen evaporates, it has to be refilled.
In the realm of personal computers, this method of cooling is seldom used in contexts other than overclocking trial-runs and record-setting attempts in the gaming world. In these instances, the CPU will usually expire within a relatively short period of time due to temperature stress caused by changes in internal temperature. Perhaps the technique will someday extend beyond "living for the moment" in computer terms.
One thing is certain, however: Reducing heat generation in Internet access devices is going to become more and more important as our devices get smaller and we stray farther and farther from home. It already is a major factor in space travel.
There is an analogy with human biology in the systems used to deliver liquid coolant to the largest, fastest computers in use today. In we humans, the largest arteries carry blood evenly to the body's major regions, and then a huge network of progressively smaller blood vessels and capillaries distributes the blood to individual locations. A similar system is used to deliver Fluorinert coolant to large supercomputers. Nanotubes have also been used for computer cooling.
Addressing the cooling issue on another level, most Internet servers now are housed in large data centers with thousand of computers rather than in individual offices or homes. The cooling requirements of such centers can require very large amounts of energy. Just last week, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers announced a formal collaboration with the The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.
Use of flash memory is one way of reducing energy expenditure and need for cooling in data centers. Wireless recharging also will be used for many devices in the future and cooling considerations would be paramount in designing such systems. And in the future, robots, the ultimate future mobile devices, will stay cool, too. David Levy in Robots Unlimited states that the heat problem will be solved through optical computing, which generates negligible heat and uses light instead of electrical signals to transport information. Whereas electronic computing uses heat-generating electrons as carriers of information, optical computing uses photons, pulses of light each composed of a minute quantity of electro-magnetic energy.
Now, that's inspiring on a hot, sunny August day: The future of computing and the Internet lies in light, not heat!
— Kim Solez, MD, Director of NKF cyberNephrology at the University of Alberta
It's summer again and you might find this description of a liquid based extreme cooling system for a gaming PC interesting, a radiator system very similar to a car!
Sleep is all the time. Cat naps at least. Or maybe kitten caplets. Or nano naps.
In a fully power managed device the CPU will drop to a lower voltage and lower clock speed dozens of times A SECOND. The process of drawing a singe frame from an MPEG file, decompressing it, moving it to the screen may put the device into 3 or 4 power states 20 times a second!
To do this we need superb interrupts handling, multi threaded devices. Right now, that means MS unless someone wants to port of Green hills. No- wait I think some companies use OS-9 which is very very good also.
Yes I think you are correct in saying that what actually takes the power and generates heat using GPS functions is the backlight and the fact that the iPhone does not sleep when using programs like GPS Tracker and other GPS programs. I don't think GPS Tracker, which allows moment to moment (but somewhat delayed) tracking of the phone's location with approval of the person using the phone, is compatible with sleep mode. Amusing to think about but I guess sleep mode is pretty important in keeping the phone cool!
Design for high temperature service is something we do all the time. For any sort of closed container, the temperature rise should be very small. Contours and finish hardly matter until you get up well past the 100 degree F range like where you see heat sinks on PC CPU chips. And these will not work unless there is airflow- no airflow in a pocket!!!
In fact, here is a formula to calculate temperature rise.
The GPS is probably not the villain on the iPhone. A SIRF GPS chip uses only about 40 mW-seconds per fix, and has a standby current of 13 micro-amps. Good power management, perhaps coupled to the iPhone intertal/movement sensors, can keep the number of 'fixes' to a minimum. If your iPhone is hot, it is probably the screen back-light- that probably uses 10x the power of anything else in the device. The design solution here is to use reflective/passive displays, like e-ink.
I am not sure about the power management in the iPhone, but most POSIX systems are pretty limited.
The real way to make a tropical phone is to use low power electronics, under careful software based/applications specific power management.
Those low power specs are true of the basic phone functions themselves. However if you think of a "lost in the African jungle" scenario, GPS tracking uses a lot of power and generates a lot of heat. GPS use can actually deplete the battery of the iPhone even when plugged into power and the phone feels quite hot to the touch. So there certainly are circumstances where the phone itself is generating a lot of heat and where cooling case design will be important.
Your are right in principle, but most mobile/handheld devices are designed to run on +/- one or two watts of of of power, and indeed to put themselves to 'sleep' when not used.
The temperature rise from a couple of watts is very small. Not sure you would see benefits from a rougher case.
The specs are exactly the same for the Treo 750 and the Motorola PEBL, for most phones I think. My iPhone still worked perfectly as a phone when some of the aps would not stay open, so I think the phone component is more tolerant of heat than the computing compenent.
As much as I love mobile technology, I am so behind the times. The operating temperature for the iPhone definitely seems limiting. Are the limitations the same when using the iPhone for calls rather than processing in extreme weather conditions? and if so, could they have built the phone component separate from the computer where it's not effected as much by temperature..assuming that cheaper phones with less functionality don't have the same issues in similar weather conditions.
Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F
(-20° to 45° C)
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
These requirements are similar to those for many other devices, and for humans. Assuming the person using the phone needs to stay cool, then cooling the phone just becomes part of the challenge of cooling the person.
We were very uncomfortable from the heat when the iPhone was malfunctioning, it is accurate to say we were malfunctioning too.
I am sure a cooling case for hot climates is coming, there already is a USB device for cooling soft drinks and this is much more important. That is what is needed, a special case for hot environments, not a different phone.
Heat directly affects computers and Internet devices.
This means that the current iphones cannot be used in Africa and regions alike. There is the need to design a pretty tropicalized model for Africa if the Iphone is to be used there. And I hope so.
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