Development of a Compact and Efficient Liquid Cooling System With Silicon Microcooler for High-Power Microelectronic Devices

In this paper, a compact and efficient single-phase liquid cooling system is developed for the microelectronic devices with high-power dissipation, such as the high performance servers, power amplifiers, and airborne systems. The developed system includes three major components: 1) a silicon-based hybrid microcooler; 2) a customized compact liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger; and 3) a commercial micropump. Our focus in this paper is on the efficiency improvement for the full cooling system, which includes the development of the silicon-based hybrid microcooler, and the optimization of the miniaturized heat exchanger with low pressure drop, small footprint area, and high heat exchange efficiency. The following accomplishments have been obtained through this paper. The developed microcooler combines the merits of both microjet array impingement and microchannel flow cooling technologies. The optimized heat exchanger is with about 50% of pressure drop, nearly 10% of the footprint area, and around 420% of heat transfer density of a commercial heat exchanger investigated in this paper as a benchmark. The developed system has been demonstrated with the heat dissipation capability of 350 W/cm
²
on a chip of 7 mm × 7 mm (a total power of 175 W) with a low pumping power of 0.1 W.