Coupled thermo-fluidic simulation for design space exploration of microchannels in liquid-cooled 3D ICs

Integrated liquid cooling is a promising idea for future 3D integrated circuits and potentially a scalable solution for ever-increasing power dissipation. In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of heat removal from a 3D stacked chip with microchannels. We build a detailed chip model and perform a coupled thermo-fluidic finite element method simulation for various microchannel designs. We explore the design space and point out the correlations between various chip and cooling parameters. In particular, we show that with ten microchannels of size 500 μm × 70 μm it is possible to remove 100 W of heat from a two-tier 3D chip while maintaining the temperature below 90°C and the pressure drop below 50 kPa.