Microchannel Cooling of Electronic Components

The current demand for ever increasing performance from integrated circuit (IC) devices has led manufacturers to continuously reduce semiconductor component size, fitting ever more components into a given chip area. This has led to dramatic increases in the power density of many silicon devices. Generally for electronic devices, the higher the temperature a component operates at, the lower the lifetime of that component.

It is acknowledged that in order for the current rate of increase in circuit performance to be maintained, new cooling technologies are required. Microchannel cooling promises orders of magnitude improvement in heat dissipation over fan cooling. It also offers a considerable reduction in the size of the heat sinks required to dissipate a given power.

Microchannels are generally defined as channels, tubes or pipes of diameter between 1 micron (0.001mm) and 1mm. By pumping a coolant such as water through these channels, very high heat fluxes can be removed compared to the conventional heatsink and fan air cooling arrangements in current use. The microchannels under investigation in the Stokes Institute have been manufactured using both bulk micromachining methods, originally devised for IC manufacture in silicon, and mechanical machining methods in a variety of substrates. The pressure flow and heat transfer behaviour of the manufactured microchannels have also been measured.