UBM Tech UBM Tech  Hot, cold, and broken: Thermal-design
techniques  By Paul Rako, Technical Editor - March 29, 2007
Both heat and cold can have an adverse effect on your circuits.
At extremely high temperatures, chips may burn up (Figure 1).
More commonly, if your design is subject to temperatures you did
not expect, many of the parts may fall out of specified limits.
When this scenario happens, your circuits may not perform as you
would expect. Equally concerning is a scenario in which
circuits' temperatures go from hot to cold and then back again.
Such situations can cause thermal shock and can even destroy
components. Many engineers do not worry about the performance of
their circuits at low temperatures, but this lack of concern is
a mistake. The performance of semiconductor devices can change
dramatically at low temperatures. The base-emitter junction
voltage of bipolar transistors rises significantly in low
temperatures (Figure 2 and Reference 1). "To design an amplifier
that can operate on 1.8V at ne