Cooling for rack-mounted communication boards: US Pat. No. 7,679,920

U.S. Patent No. 7,679,920, issued on March 16, 2010 to Solarflare Communications, Inc. of Irvine, CA, discloses a cooling configuration for chassis-mounted communications circuit boards.

Rack-mounted circuit boards need to be able to dissipate heat away from their electronics components to operate properly.  For communication circuit boards having connector ports, the patent discloses a configuration utilizing notches (for example, between the ports) in the boards permitting sufficient air circulation around the circuit boards to achieve improved cooling as compared to conventional systems. 

According to its website, Solarflare Communications develops “10 Gigabit Ethernet” (10GbE) server adapters, controllers, and other devices for low-latency networking and cloud computing.  As explained in a Solarflare whitepaper, low and predictable latencies are particularly important for various server systems, such as those used in handling high volumes of automated financial transactions, where differences in latency times of less than one millisecond can create arbitrage opportunities. 

The company’s two CTOs, Steve Pope, Ph.D. and George Zimmerman, Ph.D. also write an interesting blog entitled “Up and Down the Network Stack”.  Their post on “How to fry an egg on a Solarflare adapter” is a humorous take on QLogic’s recently-filed lawsuit against Emulex for false advertising, and their post “Sometimes you have to invent …” provides insight to their views on the value of patents to society.   According to the USPTO database, Solarflare Communications was granted five U.S. patents in 2009 and three in 2008.  For a company such as Solarflare, I might have expected a higher number of patents but they seem to be focusing their resources on pursuing patents they believe are significant technical innovations.