Thermal management is key to basestation design

Airspan has used Flotherm thermal management software to improve the performance of its AS4020 high-speed IP data and voice basestation, while reducing its size and speeding the time to market.

Airspan - the world's leading supplier of wireless DSL1 services - has significantly improved the performance of its AS4020 high-speed IP data and voice basestation, reduced the size and knocked four months off the time-to-market thanks to Flotherm thermal management software from Flomerics.

Using Flotherm to determine the cooling requirements and to bypass costly physical prototyping, Airspan was able to downsize a typical basestation installation rack from 2.2m to an extremely portable 1.45m high, without the need to house the unit in an expensive cooled exchange.

Airspan's AS4020 is ideally suited for service operators and ISPs wishing to roll out IP services to the more demanding SME, SOHO and residential customers, where high speed and commitment to quality of service are imperative.

John Woodhouse, Engineering Manager, and Mike Lyndsel, Mechanical Engineer, used Flotherm most intensively to simulate the heat dissipated by new high-performance components housed within the unit's modem shelf - which now offers users 8.5Mbit/s per radio channel in contrast to its predecessor, the AS4000, which offered users 1.7Mbit/s.

The modem shelf was also radically downsized from 550mm to just 65mm further adding to the problem of overheating, the primary cause of electronic failure.

Armed with Flotherm thermal management software and faced with the task of reducing the operating temperature from 100C to just 60C, Airspan's Engineers examined the hot spots within the subracks and the various fan configurations before placing heat sink fans on the chips and fans within the enclosure to suck in air from around the rack and to force it out through a vent in the front.

Commenting on the project, Mike Lyndsel, Mechanical Engineer, Airspan, said, "Flotherm allowed us to create our new design rapidly and to determine within a very short period of time if it was a viable option.

We were therefore able to limit the number of prototypes required to just one, so reducing our time-to-market by approximately four months.

Our GBP 12,000 annual Flotherm licence has certainly paid for itself".

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