design pcb prototyping and heatsinks are the most basic form of cooling next to simple surface convection in today's electronics devices. If you look inside the average PC, you'll probably find two or three heatsinks: on CPUs, video cards, and even the chipset of a motherboard. Heat sinks are also seen on power electronics devices like power supplies, power amplifiers, light dimmers and electronics power switching components (like SSRs). Read more about design pcb prototyping

Typically design pcb prototyping appear as nothing fancy: hunks of aluminum with a large number of protrusions. While there are different ways of manufacturing this, and different philosophies in the way they are shaped, the idea of all of them is the same: increase surface area to increase heat dissipation. Not all heat sinks are created equal. The most important factor is, naturally, its ability to dissipate the largest amount of heat in the shortest amount of time. How good it is in this is typically indicated by how much one watt of power will heat it (C/W rating).

The lower the C/W rating, the better the heat sink is at dissipating the heat, given proper ventilation and ambient temperature. Commercially made heat sinks typically have this number listed in their data sheet. This ability to transfer heat away from the component depends on a number of factors. First is material. The vast majority of this and are made out of aluminum. Aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat, and relatively cheap. Roughly speaking, conduction can be understood as the transfer of molecular kinetic energy between solids. Copper is indeed a better conductor than aluminum, but because of it's higher price for design pcb prototyping it is not common.