Surface-modified silicon heat sinks for IC thermal management

Abstract

With fast development of science and technology, integrated circuits (ICs) are asked to work with high performance in a small size nowadays. Due to the rapid increase in the power density of ICs, microscale cooling methods for IC chips have received much more attention today. Heat sinks are a key component for device cooling technology. The project will focus on design, fabricate and characterise silicon micro fin/pin fin heat sinks that would be able to improve the cooling performance of the current available heat sinks. The thermal resistance of the conventional straight fin and pin fin heat sinks have been calculated, as well as of newly-proposed surface-modified silicon chips via analytical and numerical simulation methods. A novel surface-modified all-silicon 3D heat sinks has been proposed to be fabricated with combination of deep reactive ion etching and wafer bonding technologies. Experimental set up for transient thermal property is originally designed by integrating mini wind tunnel with Raman spectrometer to evaluate the cooling capability of the silicon chip with micro pin fin and fin structures. With help of hybrid finite element analysis of the heat transfer and flow dynamics of the system, it is clarified that increase of surface area with micro-structured pin fins is effective to improve the cooling performance of heat sinks both numerically and experimentally. Chip bonding technology to assemble the micro structured silicon chips and small spacers has been explored by developing an original sample holder and optimising process conditions. The idea and technologies developed in this project would be a solid basis of further researches on thermal property control of the system via nanotechnology.

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