Cooling fan for Genesys ZU

[Aenerine]

Hi,

I would like to ask perhaps somebody from digilent directly. I noticed there will be the ultra small ultra noisy fan on the new upcomming Digilent Genesys ZU FPGA board as well as on the Eclypse  board. I am looking forward to see the price of the Ultrascale Board and will consider buying it (Its my Candidate #1 for hobby development).

https://store.digilentinc.com/genesys-zu-zynq-ultrascale-mpsoc-development-board/

https://store.digilentinc.com/eclypse-z7-zynq-7000-soc-development-board-with-syzygy-compatible-expansion/

I wonder why they insist on this terrible fan, are there no other and better ways to cool down the ~10-15Watts? Or is it just that they try to do the product as cheap as possible, which results in this extra annoying fan? I wouldn't really mind paying extra 20$ or so for a cooling solution, that actually works. I believe some passive heat sink would do more than fine with this. 

Is there some plan to purchase at least some proprietary cooling solution? Or anybody knows of a good passive heatsink, that will fit to the package of the FPGA?

Thank you

[elodg]

I see you are not a big fan (pun intended).

The Genesys ZU fan uses a 4-pin header with PWM control and feedback. The Platform MCU automatically controls the fan speed depending on the MPSoC temperature in four stages. Although these small fans are indeed noisy when turning at full speed, at 40% duty factor it is more than bearable. You are also free to disconnect and dismount the fan, leaving you with the heat sink and the responsibility to measure the temperature in your design.

The FPGA package does not leave a lot of surface area for mounting a fan. A passive solution would need to be much bigger and would require fixing holes on the PCB leaving us with less room for routing.