HOW BADLY ARE HIGH TEMPERATURE ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS REALLY NEEDED? 570166

While there has been considerable interest shown by the aircraft industry in high temperature electronic components, little information has been made generally available as to the weight penalty which can be tolerated to obtain such increased high temperature performance.

This paper presents, first, a prognostication of what environmental temperatures will be encountered by what date. It then relates those temperature environments to the weight penalties for cooling, thereby arriving at a rough rule-of-the-thumb figure that, unless the average weight increase for temperature improvement of electronic elements can be held to less than l5 to 30%, not much interest will be shown by the aircraft industry. This percentage figure is based on a supersonic mission time of about one hour and on increasing the temperature resistance to the 500-600 F range required for the next generation of aircraft. Longer high speed mission times or higher speeds will justify greater weight increases.

Also presented is the proposition that the measurement of temperature resistance is based fundamentally on the reliability of equipment operating at the prescribed temperature. That reliability itself must be further improved only adds to the problem.