화학공학소재연구정보센터
Heat Transfer Engineering, Vol.30, No.9, 736-743, 2009
Mini-Contact Enhanced Thermoelectric Coolers for On-Chip Hot Spot Cooling
Shrinking feature size and increasing transistor density, combined with the high performance demanded from next-generation microprocessors, have led to on-chip high heat flux hot spots, which have emerged as the primary driver for thermal management of today's integrated circuit (IC) technology. This article describes the use of a mini-contact to enhance the cooling flux of a miniaturized thermoelectric cooler (TEC) for on-chip hot-spot remediation. A package-level numerical simulation is developed to predict the on-chip hot spot cooling capability achievable with such a mini-contact enhanced TEC. Attention is focused on the hot-spot temperature reduction associated with variations in mini-contact size and thermoelectric element height, as well as the parasitic effect from the thermal contact resistance introduced by the mini-contact. A preliminary experiment has been conducted to verify the numeric model and to demonstrate the effects of the mini-contact on hot-spot cooling.