Integrated Silicon Microfluidic Cooling of a High-Power Overclocked CPU for Efficient Thermal Management

The stagnation of Dennard scaling along with the move towards heterogeneous 2.5D and 3D ICs is increasing thermal design power (TDP) envelopes general-purpose CPUs. With conventional cooling approaches such as air-cooling cold plates, it challenging to meet these increased requirements. Moreover, requirements necessitate larger management overheads in datacenter settings. All trends point need for a more aggressive efficient solutions. Monolithic microfluidic cooling, where silicon micropin-fins or microchannels are etched directly into backside functional silicon, has shown great potential this regard. In work, we use on back an Intel Core i7-8700K CPU overclocked dissipate up 215W while being cooled by room temperature de-ionized (DI) water. We demonstrate 44.4% reduction junction-to-inlet resistance using only 0.3× volumetric coolant flow per Watt dissipated compared cold-plate. Furthermore, higher sustained core frequencies even when elevated inlet temperatures, showing operations without expensive energy intensive refrigeration loops. scalability devices also discussed. These results scalable, solution, which can unlock power, compute systems, minimizing environmental impacts reducing overheads.