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The most common design of a heat sink is a metal device with many fins. The high thermal conductivity of the metal combined with its large surface area result in the rapid transfer of thermal energy to the surrounding, cooler, air. This cools the heat sink and whatever it is in direct thermal contact with.
A heat sink design must fulfill both its thermal as well as its mechanical requirements. Concerning the latter, the component must remain in thermal contact with its heat sink with reasonable shock and vibration. The heat sink could be the copper foil of a circuit board, or a separate heat sink mounted onto the component or circuit board.
A LM317 commonly requires a heat sink to prevent the operating temperature from rising too high. For large voltage differences, the power lost as heat can ultimately be greater than that provided to the circuit. This is the tradeoff for using linear regulators, which are a simple way to provide a stable voltage with few additional components.
Heat sinks and other cooling devices and methods are now required for many integrated circuits including microprocessors. Power MOSFETs are at risk of thermal runaway . As their on-state resistance rises with temperature, if the load is approximately a constant-current load then the power loss rises correspondingly, generating further heat.
The heat flow can be modelled by analogy to an electrical circuit where heat flow is represented by current, temperatures are represented by voltages, heat sources are represented by constant current sources, absolute thermal resistances are represented by resistors and thermal capacitances by capacitors.
Temperature increase becomes relevant for relatively small-cross-sections wires, where it may affect normal semiconductor behavior. Besides, since the generation of heat is proportional to the frequency of operation for switching circuits, fast computers have larger heat generation than slow ones, an undesired effect for chips manufacturers.
Using these ideal diodes rather than standard diodes for solar electric panel bypass, reverse-battery protection, or bridge rectifiers reduces the amount of power dissipated in the diodes, improving efficiency and reducing the size of the circuit board and the weight of the heat sink required to deal with the power dissipation.
The TO-220 package is a "power package" intended for power semiconductors and an example of a through-hole design rather than a surface-mount technology type of package. TO-220 packages can be mounted to a heat sink to dissipate several watts of waste heat. On a so-called "infinite heat sink", this can be 50 W or more.