Joe Boswell, CEO, ThermAvant Technologies 

I have 19 years of experience in the heat pipe, oscillating heat pipe and two-phase heat transfer field. I earned my engineering and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Wharton School of Business, respectively. While at ThermAvant, I've been an inventor or co-inventor on more than a half-dozen issued patents; and helped raise more than $45million in research and development funding, primarily with support from the U.S. DoD/DoW and NASA. I am lucky to work with an amazing group of engineers, managers, technicians and customers at ThermAvant Tech who have taken the company from an R&D-based startup to a fully integrated designer and manufacturer of leading-edge thermal-mechanical solutions for mission-critical platforms, mostly in the aerospace and defense industry. My wife and I have been married for 20 years and are raising our three children. When not with my family or at ThermAvant, my hobbies are biking, skiing, hiking and tennis.

What measurable benefits have you observed from implementing VITA open standards? 

VITA standards for mechanical systems, such as VITA 48.0 and next-gen VITA 100.10-13 benefit thermal management hardware providers such as ThermAvant Tech (and our customers for ruggedized systems utilizing our hardware) by allowing for “plug-and-play” implementation of new heat frames and/or chassis. This eliminates significant non-recurring engineering time and costs that would otherwise be expended. If each program had a unique set of thermal/mechanical interfaces for their circuit card assemblies, chassis and next higher assemblies, it would negatively impact budget and schedule. 

In addition to the “plug-and-play” benefits above, it also allows for faster pre-production analysis of alternative hardware solutions by setting clear, common boundaries, and again eliminates the time-and-cost expenditures during the conception and preliminary design phases of hardware development. 

 What are some technical or organizational challenges you've faced when implementing open standards and do you feel it is worth the ROI?  

Open standards have very few drawbacks in our opinion – for the reasons cited above. Of course, these standards and their relatively fixed boundaries can create constraints that a fully-customized solution would not – but at the expense of higher non-recurring investments by both our team and our customers. 

How do you maintain consistency and interoperability across generations of products while integrating new VITA revisions? 

Historically, the clear standards of VITA 48 are quite useful in terms of consistency and interoperability of our thermal/mechanical products. We are learning more about VITA revisions as new members, and we are excited to observe VITA 100 evolve as power densities continue to increase. 

What are you hearing from customers about their needs/ requirements for open standards-based designs? 

Primarily, our customers need more power density at not only the chip-level, but at the card and chassis levels. They want to be sure the standards evolve to ensure state-of-the art electronics with higher heat loads are able to be managed. 

How do you communicate the value of open standards to customers who may not fully understand their technical impact? 

Historically, our aerospace and defense customers tend to understand the value of open standards even more than we do. Increasingly more firms are entering the embedded systems market, notably in space-based applications, and we are beginning to see how ThermAvant, as a thermal-mechanical solutions provider, can assist these new entrants by better communicating the VITA standards and their benefits to them.  

What advice would you give organizations just beginning their open standards journey? 

Attend a few meetings. Read the standards. Find online case studies relevant to your area of expertise, which in our case started with conduction cooling (VITA 48.2) but has since expanded. And, I suspect your path will be pretty clear once you do so, as it was for our team.