Thermal modelling of integrated liquid cooling solutions for 3D stacked silicon modules

• Main Author: Sin, Kai Chieh.
• Other Authors: Toh Kok Chuan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Manufacturing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/17139
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the advancement in technologies, miniaturisation of electronic components has increased the demand on highly sophisticated cooling solution to remove heat from the high power density compact electronic device. A liquid cooling solution was designed previously for a three-dimensional (3D) silicon module in a multi-scale system which consists of a heat exchanger, an adapter, a mini-pump and two carriers with each having a die and a micro-channel heat sink. This project is an extension from the previous project and addresses two main issues which are 1) to improve the original carrier design to avoid interfacial gap during fabrication; the presence of interfacial gap had reduced the thermal functionalities of the original design, and 2) to study and enhance the numerical fluid flow prediction of the multi-scale package. In the first part of work, the effects of micro-channel height/width and aspect ratio on carrier’s performance were studied and compared numerically. The original design with micro-channel sized of 350 μm x 100 μm was set as the standard in any comparison works in this project. Micro-channel dimensions of 250 μm x 80 μm were chosen for the enhanced model as it can be fabricated as a single carrier from one wafer and yet can retain the thermal functionalities of the original design. In the second part of work, numerical modelling of carrier and adapter were performed in detail and hydraulic modelling was used to investigate the effectiveness of local mesh refinement in improving the numerical prediction of these two components as compared to the previous modelling result. Results showed that local mesh refinement allows milli-scale adapter modelling to have better fluid flow prediction due to the capability of ICEPAK software to provide micro-scale meshing refinement in the adapter model. For micro-scale carrier, normal detail modelling is sufficient to give relatively good fluid flow prediction. Further mesh refinement will cause the running solution unable to converge and longer processing time due to the incapability of ICEPAK software to cope with the massive refined micro elements meshing which may exceed its limitation.