Development Of An Experimental And Analytical Model Of An Active Cooling Method For High-power Three-dimensional Integrated Circuit (3D-IC) Utilizing A Multidimensional Configured Thermoelectric Modules

An increase in demand for more functionality and capacity of microelectronic components within the same logistic footprint drives the growth of three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) packaging technologies in recent years. However, the reduction in size and an increase in transistors density also intensified the heat flux of stacked-dice, which introduces many thermal challenges at both the package and cooling levels. Traditional passive cooling system such as forced air convection cooling, phase change materials and passive or active heat sinks will become inadequate to cool future processors and cannot accommodate the demand of future sub-ambient cooling of 3D-ICs. Within the past 10 years, major microprocessor manufactures have shifted their focuses toward higher bandwidth rather than frequency; however, the heat flux of current high-end CPU and GPU on the same die with parallel sequential computation is still in the order of 70 to 75 W/cm2 with local heat flux exceeding 1.5W/mm2 and growing. Today, stack-dice are used widely as low-powered memory applications because thermal management of such 3D architectures as high-powered processors inherits many thermal challenges and very costly. Heat dissipation of 3D-IC is highly non-uniform and non-unidirectional due to many factors such as material properties, power architectures, power leakage, transistor packing density, and real estate available on the processor. Inadequate thermal management of these systems leads to reduction in reliability, performance and ultimately a system's catastrophic failure. In this study, an experimental, an analytical, and a thermal cycling of an active cooling method for three-dimensional integrated circuits utilizing a multidimensional configured thermoelectric cooler were investigated. In addition, an alternative method to analyze thermoelectric cooling system employing a Modified-Graphical-Method (MGM) to eliminate the need of using proprietary fabrication information was also studied.