While there are a lot of things to be excited about Samsung’s newest flagship devices, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, there are also the “unsung heroes” that make this a smartphone that is definitely up there in terms of quality and performance. Samsung is opening the doors to one of those aspects and letting the people who worked on it share their “secrets”. Even though the cooling system isn’t the sexiest aspect of a smartphone, it is one of the most important.
The cooling system that the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge use is pretty unique as it uses a heat pipe, the first among smartphones, to dissipate the thermal radiation. The heavier load that your application processor is working on, the more the temperature increases. So most devices use thermal throttling to prevent your chipset from reaching dangerous heat levels. However, throttling also means that the performance is also affected.
For desktop computers, they use a radiator and fan to cool the CPU and still keep up the performance. But smartphones don’t have that luxury because of the size limitation. Samsung was able to create a thermal spreader to do that job, and it is in fact the thinnest heat pipe at just .4 mm in diameter. It also has a cooling liquid that turns into steam once it reaches a certain temperature and then it spreads through the pipes. But it then liquifies and returns to its normal state once it loses heat.
The engineering team also used a bit of “software wizardry” in order to make this work with the electric current used by the CPU. In short, there was a lot of work that went into creating this whole system to make your Galaxy S7 and S7 edge better than its predecessors. If you want to read more about how it worked, click on the source link where the following people shared their stories: Principle Engineer Kyungha Koo and Senior Engineer Haejin Lee from the Advanced Component Technology team, Senior Engineer Jeonggyu Jo from the Advanced Product R&D team, Senior Engineer Sanghyun Yi from the Mechanical R&D team.
