Cray Research, Inc.

Cray Incorporated

Bradley J Smith

Kent T McDaniel

Gregory W Pautsch

Gregory D Spanier

Eric Lakin

Corey Knudsen

A system and method for cooling a plurality of connectors interfacing electrical and optical signals to circuit boards in an electronics cabinet, such as backplane connectors routing signals to circuit boards housed in card cage assemblies. Heat pipes coupled to the connectors efficiently remove heat from the connectors and sink the connector heat to a cold junction of a liquid cooling system, which cooling system may also extract heat from air flow cooling the circuit boards such that the system is room neutral, meaning that the ambient temperature remains constant during operation of the system. The heat connector cooling system is effective where connectors are outside of an air flow cooling envelope that may cool the circuit boards.

Rack mounted electronics having connectors with heat cooling fingers

An information handling system includes stacks of printed circuit boards interconnected using an interconnection system. The printed circuit boards include network boards, system interface boards, memory boards, and central processing unit boards. The interconnection system for electrically connecting the various printed circuit boards includes a set of interconnection modules placed adjacent one another to form a substantially aligned row. The interconnection modules can be used to connect one stack to an orthogonally oriented stack or to a parallel oriented stack. The printed circuit board used in the interconnection system includes an inner rail positioned near the edge of the printed circuit board, an outer rail positioned near the edge of the printed circuit board, and an alignment stop attached to or positioned near one of the inner or outer rail. The most distant interconnection module of a row of aligned modules includes a spring attached thereto. The spring biases the set of interconnection modules toward the alignment stop to lessen the amount of stack up tolerance or float between the individual modules in the aligned row of interconnection modules. Electrical contact points located between the inner and the outer rail. The modules include alignment feet which have corresponding contact points. The inner and outer rail includes slots therein for clearance of the interconnection modules with the contact points.

Stop align lateral module to module interconnect

Growing community of inventors

Eau Claire, WI, United States of America

Bradley J Smith