Improving Thermal Management of CPU by Surface Roughening of Heat Sinks

Proper temperature management in electrical devices greatly boosts their performance. Thus, to maintain electrical devices at their optimal efficiency, combined hardware/software solutions are utilized for their thermal management. Here, we present a cost-effective, environmentally benign, and easy-to-implement chemical etching method to fabricate heat sinks with nano-sized roughened surfaces that can be utilized for the thermal management of central process units (CPUs) in computers. The fabricated heat sink was connected to a CPU dual cores Intel Pentium G2020 running two different benchmark programs from SPEC CPU2006 at a constant frequency. Nano-roughened heat sink (NRHS) reduced the maximum CPU temperature by nearly 4–8 °C and improved the program execution by 26% compared to the conventional heat sink (CHS). Meanwhile, a 57% increase in CPU lifetime was estimated, on average (comparing NRHS with CHS), which was aligned with the results obtained from imaging with a thermal camera. The operating temperature of the CPU connected to CHS at 2.1 GHz was almost the same as the operating temperature of CPU connected to NRHS at 2.9 GHz which means nearly 40% improvement in the processing frequency without increasing the operating temperature.