Cooling of Electronic Chips Using Microchannel and Micro-pin Fin Heat Exchangers

The research community is experiencing a revolution in microscale and nanoscale heat transfer, with a focus on developing fundamental experiments and theoretical techniques. More recently, these advancements have begun to influence the design of electronic systems. A futuristic electronic cooling solution might include high efficiency thermoelectric devices made from nanomaterials for the cooling of hotspots on a chip, nano/micro particle laden thermal interface materials and micro-pin fin/microchannel based heat exchanger. Liquid cooling using integrated microscale heat exchangers is a promising future technology to address issues associated with integrated circuit thermal management. In this paper recent advances made by us on technology development of microchannel/micro-pin-fin heat exchangers is presented. Particular attention is given to the impact of hotspots on the performance of microchannel cooling. INTRODUCTION The research community is experiencing a revolution in microscale and nanoscale heat transfer, with a focus on developing fundamental experiments and theoretical techniques. More recently, these advancements have begun to influence the design of electronic systems. A futuristic electronic cooling solution might include high efficiency thermoelectric devices made from nanomaterials for the cooling of hotspots on a chip, nano/micro particle laden thermal interface materials and micro-pin fin/microchannel based heat exchanger. Liquid cooling using integrated microscale heat exchangers is a promising future technology to address issues associated with integrated circuit thermal management. In this paper recent advances made by us on technology development of microchannel/micro-pin-fin heat exchangers is presented. Particular attention is given to the impact of hotspots on the performance of microchannel cooling. Figure 1: Historical trend chart ofmicroprocessor TDP versus frequency. Data is based on Intel microprocessors and different symbols in the graph represent different classes ofmicroprocessors. The TDP trend for each class is expected to level off with the transition to multicore processors [1]. Figure 2: Illustrative IR images of two typical microprocessors showing on-die hot spots due to nonuniform power distributions on die. Die sizes are not to scale. [1]