High performance air cooled heat sinks for integrated circuits

A simple, compact, high-performance air cooling technology is described that combines laminar flow with certain heat-sink designs to achieve a cooling performance of <2 degrees C/W/cm/sup 2/ at 2 ft/sup 3//min. It has the capability to remove in excess of 600 W from a multichip module (25 chips at 25 W and 16% chip-to-substrate coverage) with a quiet 10-W tubeaxial fan. The volume of the complete module including the plenum and the fan is only about 1 l. The chips are held to maximum temperature rise of 55 degrees C. Even higher cooling performance at greater chip-to-substrate coverage is shown to be possible with larger air movers. This technology extends the applicability of air cooling to the power levels of complex liquid-cooled modules.<
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