Thermal management of integrated electronics

• Main Author: Dameracharla, Prithvi Raj
• Other Authors: Tan, Chuan Seng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/61392
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The power densities in high-performance microelectronics has been ever-increasing and hence, there is an increased need of Novel Thermal Management techniques. The shrinking size of these devices coupled with rising power density has led to a substantial increase in the temperature of the device, much beyond the desired operating temperature needed for a reliable performance. A typical silicon based technology needs efficient thermal management schemes which have high heat transfer co-efficients, which can dissipate heat fluxes above ≈100 W/cm2 without increasing the operating temperatures beyond ≈ 80°C . The traditional state-of-art single phase cooling systems which rely solely on sensible heat are very bulky and are not sufficient to fulfill our increasing requirements. As a result, we are in need of phase-change based novel thermal management solutions which exploit latent heat of vaporization of liquids which yield a higher heat transfer with little increase in temperature.The author has worked with researchers at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) on this issue. In this report, the author presents a multiphase thermal management technique where arrays of cylindrical micropillars of silicon are used for thinfilm evaporation. The author has investigated the effects of micropillar height, pitch, diameter and the array length on maximum heat dissipation capability. An analytical model was developed by the research team at SMART to predict the experimentally observed values of evaporative heat flux. Due to limitations in the experimental setup, the author could only qualitatively capture the parametric effects of micropillar geometry.