Importance of electronics cooling

With the continuous miniaturization of and integration of transistors in packaged chips, the heat flux
that is required to maintain the package within operational limits has risen to levels that exceed
conventional cooling methods.

In recent times, thermal management has been one of the area which has limited futhur increase in the
power density of electronic packages.

Also, maintaining electronics within a certain temperature range is crucial as temperatures above a
maximum limit will hurt its operational performance and operational life badly.

Why heat generation?

Operation of Integrated Circuits(ICs) is accomplished with heat generation due to power dissipation as a
result of:

1. Leakage power

2. Switching Power

3. Short-circuit power (All these would be elaborated)

Consequences of heat generation:

1. Decreases carrier mobility: Due to this, a lower driving current and device’s response speed.

2. Increases leakage power: Leads to increased power consumption and may lead to thermal
runaway.

3. Increases Failure rate due to thermally activated mechanisms like gate oxide breakdown, hot
electron effects, negative bias temperature instability, etc.

Types of cooling systems:

1. Passive air cooling: Heat is transferred via natural convection and radiation, and the surface area of
the heat sink is increased by addition of fins.

2. Forced air cooling: A pump blows air over the heat sink. Due to increased flow rate, the heat
dissipation rate increases. Also, the flow resistance by finned surfaces reduces when the air is forced
through.

3. Liquid cooling: employed when high heat dissipation rate is required and is more complicated due to
added components making it a closed loop system.

Liquid cooling through micro-channels is considered as one of the feasible method to address this
problem.
Why Micro-channel cooling?

Cold liquid is made to flow through channels that have microscopic width to achieve high heat transfer
rates. (about 1000W/m^2)

These micro-channels can be directly etched on the back of the IC.

Convection heat transfer coefficient is dependent inversely on channel width.

Since the channel dimensions are in micro-meters, the total amount of channels and thus the total heat
exchanging area increases.

The higher heat dissipation fluxes are achieved at an expense of higher pumping pressures.
Their successful integration will depend on various system factors like energy efficiency, total weight,
volume, manufacturability, material compatibility and cost.

Mathematical Overview

Performance of heat sink is measured in terms of thermal resistance offered:

Total thermal resistance offered is a combination of:

a) Resistance due to conduction from circuit through substrate, package, heat sink

b) Resistance during convection from sink to coolant

c) Heat absorption that the flowing fluid can offer in a unit time at a certain flow rate.

In most applications, the chip width is very small, and thus resistance due to thermal conduction can be
reduced to a level where it is negligible with respect to the other two resistances. For simplicity this
term would be assumed to be negligible.

Also, heat absorption capacity can be increased by using a fluid of sufficiently high specific heat and thus
its resistance can be reduced to a level where finding the resistance during convection becomes the
most important parameter.

Finding Convection Coefficient

It is customary to calculate convection coefficient ‘h’ using dimensionless groups:

On the basis of experimental observations:

The usage of multiple channels results in increase of surface area by a factor ‘α’

α= (total surface area of channel walls)/ (area of circuit)

Overview of Design Procedures:

1. Finding surface area increase ‘α’.

2. Finding thermal resistance due to convection

3. finding thermal resistance due to finite heat absorption capacity of fluid.

Designing Process:

Considering a collection of ‘n’ parallel channels each of length L imbedded in the substrate of length ‘L’
and width ‘W’.

A coolant flows in each channel, absorbing constant heat flow per unit length of from its wall.
Surface area increase ‘α’ = 2z/ (wc + ww)

(i)

(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(v)

The two main design variables resistance to convection and due to finite capacity of fluid depend on w c,
ww and surface area multiplication factor ‘α’.

Based constraint like minimum dimension of channels, manufacturing limitations etc., various
optimization techniques like shape optimization, topology optimization algorithms etc. are employed
these days to find the best combination of these variables that seek to minimize resistance.