Zedboard support for 75 Degree Ambient temperature

[ravisharma]

HI,

We have got Zedboard Rev C, D, E. F and we are trying to run Zedboard inside chamber which is at 75 Degrees ambient.

 

We are seeing CRC failure when we do SD Card write. Our test cases is to execute IO at high temperature. 

 

Can anyone suggest if there is any workaround to resolve this issue? We tried to get industrial but the vendor shipped commercial grade citing industrial boards are not built nowadays.

 

Thanks,

Ravi

 

[elodg]

This is a tough nut to crack. Even 75 degrees ambient could work if the design itself does not dissipate much power and the cooling is efficient enough to not let the Zynq die temperature go above 85 degrees. I see that SanDisk SD cards too tap out at 85 degrees.

If the source of the CRC error is exclusive to I/O, you could try lowering the data rate. I assume you are trying 25MB/s (50MHz)?

[zygot]

If you need a robust long-term solution to operating a board outside it's "normal" operating conditions, the only realistic way to address the problem is by encasing it in a box and controlling the environment inside of that. Certainly there are additional problems introduced with this approach. Of course, adding heat is generally a lot easier than dissipating heat, which is what you have to do. Over time, there are a lot of things that could go wrong; right down to the behavior of the solder used to connect the parts to the PCB. I'm assuming that you want to use your boards over extended periods.

Trying to address pieces of the problem of high temperature operation by waiting to observe obvious failure conditions is not a good long term strategy.

Have you considered an alternate approach to data management other than the SD card route? Perhaps there's a way to "cheat" the system ( that is reality ) ...

When one approach to a problem, as defined by some "arbitrary" box, isn't working it might be reasonable to change the definition of the box. This depends on the the requirements of the task at hand, but sometimes the requirements aren't as concrete as we assume; hence the term "thinking outside the box".

Edited February 16, 2022 by zygot