Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Single-Phase Liquid Cooling for Heterogeneous Integration Multi-Chip Module

Abstract The variety of new electronic packaging technologies has grown significantly over the last 20 years as a result of market demands for higher device performance at lower costs and in less space. Those demands have pushed for heterogeneous packaging, where computer chips with different stack heights are closely packed, creating non-uniform heat flux and temperature and with poor thermal management it will escalate thermal stresses on the chip, and potential reliability issues. To mimic this real-life scenario packaging, an experimental setup was designed and built. The design of the new experimental setup consists of four identical 1.2 cm × 1.2 cm ceramic heaters, each of which is connected to a separate power supply and can reach a heat flux of 140 W/cm2. Accordingly, this mock package is capable of delivering different power levels to mimic different multicore microprocessor conditions. To give the heater the ability to move precisely in the x, y, and z directions, each heater is mounted to an XYZ linear stage. Deionized water was used as the working fluid, and a pin-fin heat sink was used to run the initial steady-state tests on the experimental rig. The tests showed how different flow rates at constant fluid temperature and input power affect the temperatures of the heaters and the thermohydraulic performance of the heat sink. In addition, a three-dimensional numerical model has been developed and validated with experimental data in terms of heat sink pressure drop and temperatures of the heaters.