3D-printed chip cooler beats all air alternatives
Imec’s chip cooler is an impingement-based cooler with distributed coolant outlets that put the cooling liquid in direct contact with the chip and sprays the liquid perpendicular to the chip surface. This ensures that all the liquid on the chip surface has the same temperature and reduces the contact time between coolant and chip. Unlike legacy impingement coolers that are expensively made out of silicon, the new impingement chip cooler uses polymers instead of silicon. Built using high-resolution stereolithography 3D printing, the device features nozzles only 300µm in diameter, whose pattern design can easily be customized during fabrication to match the heat map of the chip beneath.
“Our new impingement chip cooler is actually a 3D printed ‘showerhead’ that sprays the cooling liquid directly onto the bare chip,” clarifies Herman Oprins, senior engineer at Imec. “3D prototyping has improved in resolution, making it available for realizing microfluidic systems such as our chip cooler.”
The impingement cooler achieves a high cooling efficiency, with a chip temperature increase of less than 15°C per 100W/cm2 for a coolant flow rate of 1 l/min. Moreover, it features a pressure drop as low as 0.3 bar, thanks to the smart internal cooler design. It is said to outperform benchmark conventional cooling solutions in which the thermal interface materials alone already cause a 20 to 50°C temperature increase. What’s more the cooling solution matches the footprint of the chip package enabling chip package reduction and more efficient cooling.
Imec – www.imec.be
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