Experimental characterization of a chip-level 3-D printed microjet liquid impingement cooler for high-performance systems

Wei, Tiwei, Oprins, Herman, Cherman, Vladimir, Yang, Shoufeng, De Wolf, Ingrid, Beyne, Eric and Baelmans, Martine (2019) Experimental characterization of a chip-level 3-D printed microjet liquid impingement cooler for high-performance systems. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, 9 (9), 1815-1824. (doi:10.1109/TCPMT.2019.2905610).

Abstract

The chip-level bare die direct liquid impingement jet cooling is regarded as a highly efficient cooling solution for high-performance applications. Furthermore, it shows potential to be integrated inside the chip package. In previous studies, we demonstrated this cooling concept using a prototype fabricated with mechanical micromachining using polymers. With the improvement of fabrication resolution, additive manufacturing or 3-D printing technology enables the fabrication of low-cost polymer microjet coolers with complex internal 3-D geometries and allows easy customization of the cooler design. In this paper, a chip-level impingement jet cooler with a 4 × 4 jet array and 575-μm nozzle diameter is fabricated with highresolution stereolithography, and assembled directly on the top of the bare die. The modeling study shows that the pressure drop in the 3-D printed cooler is reduced by 24% compared to the micromachined (MM) cooler with the same nozzle dimensions thanks to an improved more complex internal geometry. The fabrication quality and tolerances of the printed cooler are evaluated using optical measurements, scanning acoustic microscope (SAM) inspection, and cross-sectional analysis, showing a measured average nozzle diameter of 575 μm compared to the designed nozzle diameter of 600 μm. Moreover, the 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations used in this paper are experimentally validated by chip temperature measurements. The achieved minimal thermal resistance of 3-D printed 4×4 cooler is 0.16 cm 2 ·K/W for a flow rate of 1000 mL/min. The benchmarking study shows the cooler size can be reduced by a factor of 6.5 by using the 3-D printing technology compared to the MM cooler.

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Contributors

Author: Shoufeng Yang

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