Wei Ling

Biography

Wei has provided significant contributions to the thermal design and development of a broad range of ALU products and platforms, including: ONG/IP Transport products (1830 PSS family, Lambda family), Multi-Service Access Platforms, wireless base-stations, Enterprise VPN Firewall products, and Bell Labs research projects.

Currently, Wei is the principal thermal architect for the ALU IP Transport 1830 PSS family of platforms, the next-generation WDM multiservice transport from access to cores with multi-terabit OTN switching and photonics capacities, that enable high-performance 100G and an evolutionary path to 400G/800G transport.  Wei has led the thermal design of the PSS platform since its inception in 2006. His contributions to the 1830 PSS 100G (the world’s first commercially available, single carrier, coherent solution that primed the market for the ensuing family of 1830 PSS products) was recognized by a Bell Labs President’s Award for the 100G team in 2010. He created and currently maintains an open web-based database of his key technical reports that document the thermal performance assessment of critical design evolutions of 1830 PSS circuit packs, as well as, system-level evaluations. This database chronicles the incremental evolution of the 1830 PSS thermal design, under Wei’s direction, which provides physical, photonic, and electronic system designers a better understanding of the tradeoffs between system functionality, capability, packaging and thermal performance.

Wei has an outstanding technical foundation with a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in Heat Transfer and Computational Fluid Dynamics, as well as, Master’s degrees in both Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.  He combines both a broad level of experience in thermal management, ranging from device level component to data center environmental and room cooling, with a deep, world–class, understanding of the theoretical foundations of thermal and general transport phenomena. This unique combination of skills allows him to frequently suggest novel applications of established thermal management techniques, as well as, clever manipulation of thermal simulation software to model and validate innovative concepts.

 In addition to his focus on state-of-the art thermal management techniques, Wei has consistently embraced innovation which is apparent by his 4 patents in advanced cooling concepts -- including a patent for the award winning (Japan’s 2010 Green IT Award) ALU Modular Cooling Solution (MCS). Wei proposed the initial idea of in-frame, liquid cooling of electronic equipment and conducted numerical simulations to prove the feasibility of the concept. The MCS is up to 40X more efficient in transporting heat than conventional room air conditioning units by exploiting the superior heat capacity (i.e., latent heat) of phase-change cooling. Wei is also a co-inventor of a novel thermosyphon-based shelf-level cooling concept.