the talk provides an overall review of thermal design performance limitations and thermal management techniques covering 3-d microsystems with focus on mobile and handheld products. thermal challenges are discussed including a key thermal design parameter concerning outer skin temperature limits based on natural convection and radiation with the ambient. passive conduction techniques to increase the internal thermal performance of boards, substrates and ic packages are discussed.

the talk provides an overview on internal ic’s thermal performance enhancements utilizing liquid cooling. the discussion walks through a numerical example introducing an efficient microchannel pumped liquid cooled system for compact electronic form factors. the performance of the liquid cooled system is discussed at length and compared to conventional heat pipe based thermal architecture. tradeoffs of various system related parameters are discussed in details. system parameters included microchannel effects and pump scaling and heat exchange scaling effects. other die level parameters are considered including die silicon thinning, tim characteristics and effects of cpu heat flux non-uniformity. it is shown that while pumped liquid cooled system offers a significant performance increase over conventional heat pipe based architecture, system design ought to consider other important parameters for enhancing performance. these parameters include the die-to-cold plate tim performance, die thickness for spreading reasons and heat exchanger performance.

the talk while showing the benefit of liquid cooling in general, it focuses on the importance of taking an integrated system approach for thermal design of systems. the role of liquid cooling of increasing systems thermal performance can be significantly enhanced when factoring into the design and optimization the above system parameters.

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