skip to main content

Title: A System to Package Perspective on Transient Thermal Management of Electronics
Abstract There are many applications throughout the military and commercial industries whose thermal profiles are dominated by intermittent and/or periodic pulsed thermal loads. Typical thermal solutions for transient applications focus on providing sufficient continuous cooling to address the peak thermal loads as if operating under steady-state conditions. Such a conservative approach guarantees satisfying the thermal challenge but can result in significant cooling overdesign, thus increasing the size, weight, and cost of the system. Confluent trends of increasing system complexity, component miniaturization, and increasing power density demands are further exacerbating the divergence of the optimal transient and steady-state solutions. Therefore, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way thermal and packaging engineers approach design to focus on time domain heat transfer design and solutions. Due to the application-dependent nature of transient thermal solutions, it is essential to use a codesign approach such that the thermal and packaging engineers collaborate during the design phase with application and/or electronics engineers to ensure the solution meets the requirements. This paper will provide an overview of the types of transients to consider—from the transients that occur during switching at the chip surface all the way to the system-level transients which transfer heat to more » air. The paper will cover numerous ways of managing transient heat including phase change materials (PCMs), heat exchangers, advanced controls, and capacitance-based packaging. Moreover, synergies exist between approaches to include application of PCMs to increase thermal capacitance or active control mechanisms that are adapted and optimized for the time constants and needs of the specific application. It is the intent of this transient thermal management review to describe a wide range of areas in which transient thermal management for electronics is a factor of significance and to illustrate which specific implementations of transient thermal solutions are being explored for each area. The paper focuses on the needs and benefits of fundamentally shifting away from a steady-state thermal design mentality to one focused on transient thermal design through application-specific, codesigned approaches. « less
Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ;
Award ID(s):
1934482
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10207171
Journal Name:
Journal of Electronic Packaging
Volume:
142
Issue:
4
ISSN:
1043-7398
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract Thermal metamaterials exhibit thermal properties that do not exist in nature but can be rationally designed to offer unique capabilities of controlling heat transfer. Recent advances have demonstrated successful manipulation of conductive heat transfer and led to novel heat guiding structures such as thermal cloaks, concentrators, etc. These advances imply new opportunities to guide heat transfer in complex systems and new packaging approaches as related to thermal management of electronics. Such aspects are important, as trends of electronics packaging toward higher power, higher density, and 2.5D/3D integration are making thermal management even more challenging. While conventional cooling solutions based on large thermal-conductivity materials as well as heat pipes and heat exchangers may dissipate the heat from a source to a sink in a uniform manner, thermal metamaterials could help dissipate the heat in a deterministic manner and avoid thermal crosstalk and local hot spots. This paper reviews recent advances of thermal metamaterials that are potentially relevant to electronics packaging. While providing an overview of the state-of-the-art and critical 2.5D/3D-integrated packaging challenges, this paper also discusses the implications of thermal metamaterials for the future of electronic packaging thermal management. Thermal metamaterials could provide a solution to nontrivial thermal management challenges.more »Future research will need to take on the new challenges in implementing the thermal metamaterial designs in high-performance heterogeneous packages to continue to advance the state-of-the-art in electronics packaging.« less
  2. Forecasting data center cooling demand remains a primary thermal management challenge in an increasingly larger global energy-consuming industry. This paper proposes a dynamic modeling approach to evaluate two different strategies for delivering cold air into a data center room. The common cooling method provides air through perforated floor tiles by means of a centralized distribution system, hindering flow management at the aisle level. We propose an idealized system such that five overhead heat exchangers are located above the aisle and handle the entire server cooling demand. In one case, the overhead heat exchangers force the airflow downwards into the aisle (Overhead Downward Flow (ODF)); in the other case, the flow is forced to move upwards (Overhead Upward Flow (OUF)). A complete fluid dynamic, heat transfer, and thermodynamic analysis is proposed to model the system’s thermal performance under both steady state and transient conditions. Inside the servers and heat exchangers, the flow and heat transfer processes are modeled using a set of differential equations solved in MATLAB™. This solution is coupled with ANSYS-Fluent™, which computes the three-dimensional velocity, temperature, and turbulence on the Airside. The two approaches proposed (ODF and OUF) are evaluated and compared by estimating their cooling effectiveness andmore »the local Entropy Generation. The latter allows identifying the zones within the room responsible for increasing the inefficiencies (irreversibilities) of the system. Both approaches demonstrated similar performance, with a small advantage shown by OUF. The results of this investigation demonstrated a promising approach of data center on-demand cooling scenarios.« less
  3. Thermal management is becoming a critical technology challenge for modern electronics with decreasing device size and increasing power density. One key materials innovation is the development of advanced thermal interfaces in electronic packaging to enable efficient heat dissipation and improve device performance, which has attracted intensive research efforts from both academia and industry over the past several decades. Here we review the recent progress in both theory and experiment for developing high-performance thermal interface materials. First, the basic theories and computational frameworks for interface energy transport are discussed, ranging from atomistic interface scattering to multiscale disorders that contributed to thermal boundary resistance. Second, state-of-the-art experimental techniques including steady-state and transient thermal measurements are discussed and compared. Moreover, the important structure design, requirements, and property factors for thermal interface materials depending on different applications are summarized and exemplified with the recent literature. Finally, emerging new semiconductors and polymers with high thermal conductivity are briefly reviewed and opportunities for future research are discussed.
  4. Abstract

    Power semiconductor devices are fundamental drivers for advances in power electronics, the technology for electric energy conversion. Power devices based on wide-bandgap (WBG) and ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors allow for a smaller chip size, lower loss and higher frequency compared with their silicon (Si) counterparts, thus enabling a higher system efficiency and smaller form factor. Amongst the challenges for the development and deployment of WBG and UWBG devices is the efficient dissipation of heat, an unavoidable by-product of the higher power density. To mitigate the performance limitations and reliability issues caused by self-heating, thermal management is required at both device and package levels. Packaging in particular is a crucial milestone for the development of any power device technology; WBG and UWBG devices have both reached this milestone recently. This paper provides a timely review of the thermal management of WBG and UWBG power devices with an emphasis on packaged devices. Additionally, emerging UWBG devices hold good promise for high-temperature applications due to their low intrinsic carrier density and increased dopant ionization at elevated temperatures. The fulfillment of this promise in system applications, in conjunction with overcoming the thermal limitations of some UWBG materials, requires new thermal management and packagingmore »technologies. To this end, we provide perspectives on the relevant challenges, potential solutions and research opportunities, highlighting the pressing needs for device–package electrothermal co-design and high-temperature packages that can withstand the high electric fields expected in UWBG devices.

    « less
  5. Abstract

    Thermal management is the most critical technology challenge for modern electronics. Recent key materials innovation focuses on developing advanced thermal interface of electronic packaging for achieving efficient heat dissipation. Here, for the first time we report a record-high performance thermal interface beyond the current state of the art, based on self-assembled manufacturing of cubic boron arsenide (s-BAs). The s-BAs exhibits highly desirable characteristics of high thermal conductivity up to 21 W/m·K and excellent elastic compliance similar to that of soft biological tissues down to 100 kPa through the rational design of BAs microcrystals in polymer composite. In addition, the s-BAs demonstrates high flexibility and preserves the high conductivity over at least 500 bending cycles, opening up new application opportunities for flexible thermal cooling. Moreover, we demonstrated device integration with power LEDs and measured a superior cooling performance of s-BAs beyond the current state of the art, by up to 45 °C reduction in the hot spot temperature. Together, this study demonstrates scalable manufacturing of a new generation of energy-efficient and flexible thermal interface that holds great promise for advanced thermal management of future integrated circuits and emerging applications such as wearable electronics and soft robotics.