Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

The patent is about creating heat conduction paths through the PCB for an SoC, that's it. There are many useful cases and implementations presented throughout the patent.

"The electronic equipment ensures a higher degree of freedom in a component layout or enhances cooling performance for the electronic component."

"In the case where another heat radiating apparatus is disposed on the upper surface [..] two heat radiating apparatuses are provided on the integrated circuit apparatus, thus contributing to improved cooling performance"

They can have heatpipes connecting the bottom side back to the main heatsink, and take as much heat as possible from the SoC through the board in addition to the main heatsink. This can cool chips which would otherwise have too much thermal density at 7nm. It may or may not be used in the PS5, but it's definitely a useful way to get impossible clocks.
 
Is this the PS5's cooling system?

https://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20200126884&IDKey=0F180FFF3C7A

EDIT: well, obviously just a tiny part, mostly a heartsink innovation from the looks of it, bringing the heartsink to both sides of the mb.

It may be possible that this is applied to something in the PS5 or associated with it, but there are a lot of components in the console or peripherals that might use this. I think a lot of the scenarios outlined are not important to the APU or may interfere with components with high power and connectivity requirements.

If so, what are the benefits ?
More freedom in component placement, and potentially some ancillary improvements in cooling efficiency, component stacking, cooling encased chips in an inline package, and minimizing heatsink mounting pressure during.
However, a lot of those are usually not limited in this manner for a central processor. The top-mounted heatpipes or vapor chambers are already more than sufficient compared to a through-board heatsink, and the heat density and wiring requirements don't play well with stacking or encasing the APU in a plastic block with other components. The APU is very likely to need high mounting pressure for its optimal transfer characteristics, so backing off on that seems counterproductive and might be a source of variation in thermal performance between individual consoles.

I don't see a major demand for mounting a wireless transmitter on top of the Zen cores, and I don't know of a reasonable thermal interface material that would function equivalently to a standard mounting when the through-PCB solution would be the equivalent of having a thermal pad or thermal grease application as thick as a PCB and BGA substrate.
The spacing requirements for the high-speed DRAM buses tend to give breathing room for the APU, regardless.
It's a broad patent in other ways, with many choices in how the PCB is structured, what package the chips are in, or what materials join the sides together. Some of the options like having a lot of metal under the chip, large thermal connections relative to the solder balls, or making the thermal links part of electrical ground may not play well with the sort of connectivity needs of a high-speed chip, but I'm not familiar with the (edit: signalling) needs of chips like that.

Perhaps other components with more modest power dissipation and electrical needs could find a use case. Smaller controllers or support components could fit this more readily and might not need high-performing heat transfer. LEDs, motors, and inverters are also mentioned and they have more tractable connectivity and power needs.
The focus on layout, multi-component inline packages, LEDs, motors, and combining of a specialized PCB's production and thermal interface could point to a space-constrained element like a controller, perhaps.
Maybe some other board elements in the console's main board could use this, we haven't seen indications of Sony's layout for the PS5.
Perhaps some of the power-delivery components have the underside space and can tolerate some of the limitations such cooling could have. The SSD might be be modest enough in power consumption, although I'm not certain about the connection requirements of the controller and all the NAND chips.


Many modern PC mainboards have heatpipes and sinks wrapping around them and going through them, as a good example.
None of them try to drill through to the underside of a major SOC, however.
 
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If the heatpipes go through the board, PS5 is going to be a pain to do repairs on. Unless the pipes can be detached from the fins and removed completely.
 
If the heatpipes go through the board, PS5 is going to be a pain to do repairs on. Unless the pipes can be detached from the fins and removed completely.
Not a problem if the SoC is close to the edge of the board, with a routed cutout from the edge if necessary. It can slide in or out. There's a million ways to make this work including a two piece design. The difficult part here is getting more heat through the board than the traditional "via stitching", and specially getting through the chip's package, laminate, underfill, etc... from the other side.

The biggest issue is that there's a lot of signals all over the place to shove around, and it's either in the critical frequency range (gddr6), or high current power planes where you don't want to create inductive loops by poking holes all around. There's a reason it's never been done, it's not an easy thing to do. I wonder if the chip itself would need to be carefully designed purposefully for this to work.

Figure 4 is the interesting one for high power devices.
 
Is that how some GPU's (aftermarket perhaps) have done/do it?

No, GPU/APU package must be made with this cooling solution in mind, that's not aftermarket solution ...

If the heatpipes go through the board, PS5 is going to be a pain to do repairs on. Unless the pipes can be detached from the fins and removed completely.

imo, this is not what we know as heatpipe, it's thermal conductive vias in pcb, only interesting thing is that they want to use it on BGA package with high heat output
 
The difficult part here is getting more heat through the board than the traditional "via stitching",

maybe filled vias with a material with better thermal coductivity than a base material of pcb :) ... imo this is not for PS5, would be interesting if they pull out something like this but I doubt it.
 
maybe filled vias with a material with better thermal coductivity than a base material of pcb :) ... imo this is not for PS5, would be interesting if they pull out something like this but I doubt it.
There's copper-filled vias available, which are pretty good, but it only goes through the PCB. It's the solder balls conducting to the rest of the chip, the PCB itself is used as a heatsink. This is done for low power chips all the time, but for high power it would need something going through the whole stack instead of using the solder balls which isn't very heat-conductive.

I agree there isn't a big chance this would be used for PS5 (on the SoC at least, the custom ssd or southbridge are still good candidates), but it's fun to speculate.

There's no need to spend that effort and manufacturing to improve thermal performance on a 2 or 3 watts chip, unless form factor is critical.
 
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There's copper-filled vias available, which are pretty good, but it only goes through the PCB. It's the solder balls conducting to the rest of the chip, the PCB itself is used as a heatsink. This is done for low power chips all the time, but for high power it would need something going through the whole stack instead of using the solder balls which isn't very heat-conductive.

I agree there isn't a big chance this would be used for PS5 (on the SoC at least), but it's fun to speculate.

maybe use of word via is misleading because people start imagining standard solutions, as the patent says it's simple 'through hole', filled with a material with higher thermal coductivity than a base material of pcb but having a higher electric resistance than that of the electric circuit, so probably not copper filled vias.
 
maybe use of word via is misleading because people start imagining standard solutions, as the patent says it's simple 'through hole', filled with a material with higher thermal coductivity than a base material of pcb but having a higher electric resistance than that of the electric circuit, so probably not copper filled vias.
The one with metal parts inserted as tetris pieces is probably not anything standard, but in one of the examples, they do mention using standard PCB production to fill the vias, so that one it would be the 2-step copper filling:
https://hofstetter-pcb.ch/en_US/thf-through-hole-filling-2/

The advantage is obviously that it costs very little, and they can be non-connected vias all over the chip, and the same principle all over the substrate, with thermally conductive epoxy as an underfill maybe?

In a checkerboard pattern. Faux-bga. :runaway:
 
We've been through this patent quite often throughout the last year AFAIK.

If you could cool a chip from both sides, you'd probably be able to keep it a lot cooler even with the same heatsink dissipation area and the same airflow.
Of course that would require at least the center of the chip to have no contact pins, because you'd need to have some copper touching that.
 
Seems like a waste of time and a divergence of resources. Thats why they failed with vita and nintendo consolidated their business.

PSP then Vita were powerful 3D consoles in their own right that in terms of developer effort were closer to home consoles (PS2/PS3) than anything Nintendo had done. This meant PSP/Vita games needed a fair bit of investment for what were relatively small platforms. A portable PS4 needs engineering work once, then plays all the PS4 games already out there. This is the draw of Switch, you buy one console and one game, you play that game on your big TV or on the train.
 
PSP then Vita were powerful 3D consoles in their own right that in terms of developer effort were closer to home consoles (PS2/PS3) than anything Nintendo had done. This meant PSP/Vita games needed a fair bit of investment for what were relatively small platforms. A portable PS4 needs engineering work once, then plays all the PS4 games already out there. This is the draw of Switch, you buy one console and one game, you play that game on your big TV or on the train.

Exactly my point. The poster i responded to said they wanted ps4 titles and the thing to be supported by itself. No pub is going to release a handheld that has to compete against other software divisions anymore as seperately supported ecosystems. Because it will either take resources away from the console or the handheld respectively.

Nintendos solution to this is to merge their console and handheld divisions together and focus on mobile level tech for big screen and handheld through switch and switch lite. Sonys solution was to get out of handheld market entirey and focus on their bread and butter console development
 
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