Evaluation of microchannel networks for efficient cooling of IC chips using Single-Phase cooling

Abstract

This era is called information age. Computational equipment make possible to generate, transfer and process data each second worldwide. IC chips are the bases of these electronic devices. Thus, there is a deep interest in these high-tech electronic technologies. Since the development of the transistor in the Bell Laboratories, the IC chips have grown strongly, mainly in the slenderness and its number of transistors. For example, the Intel? Core” ¡7 is currently a part of the newest computational processor generation manufactured by Intel” Corporations. lts architecture is formed by 774 million of 64 nm-transistor (compared on its predecessor, this device has an increase of fourteen times the number of these vital components.) By 2016, it is projected that the next computation processor generation will have 10-30 nm architecture with an increase of 1.3 times in the number of transistors. Although the panorama looks pretty good, there is an important drawback of this tendency. The transfer of electrons into the IC chip generates an important amount of thermal energy, which is affected directly by the increase of the number of transistors, and inversely by the decrease of the computational processor size. Thus, several researchers have been focused to enhance current cooling IC chip technology as well as generate novel cooling systems. Since the beginning of this century, liquid cooling technologies have received a deep attention for the next cooling electronic device generation. Large part of the researchers developed in this area has been addressed to study microchannel heat sinks, The large heat transfer coefficient that the cooling fluid can achieve when is flowing through these tiny devices as well as the heat sink slenderness, make them a true alternative for dissipating the high heat fluxes to be generated in the next computational processors generation. Good knowledge of the phenomena and generation of novel configurations have been the main result of these studies. However, a couple of problem remains present: non-uniform junction temperature and high fluid pressure drop. Studies focused to analyze the thermo-mechanical effects generated on the IC chip have shown that the hotspots produce several damages into the chip. Thus, it is highly desirable to generate homogeneous temperature in the cooling system. Moreover, the system energy requirements increase directly with the pressure drop. Thus, reduction of this energy losses is desirable in order to do more reliable the cooling system (appropriate pumping power). This work is a contribution in the microchannel heat sink area aimed to obtain a micro cooling system capable to generate uniform junction temperature with the lowest pressure drop penalty. Analytical and numerical studies are carried out in order to achieve this goal / Carlos Alberto Rubio-Jimenez ; directores: Satish G. Kandlikar, Abel Hernandez-Guerrero.