Air Cooling and Water Cooling for Data Center High-Speed I/O Interconnects

Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable-Double Density (QSFP-DD) high-speed I/O interconnect system is the smallest form factor being able to support ultra-high data speed. Furthermore, the data speed of QSFP-DD system is increasing rapidly during the last 5 years, driven by the ultra-high data speed applications, such as Cloud Computing and 5G/6G network. However, the increase in data speed comes at the cost of increase in power dissipation, which has increased from about 5 W/port to 30 W/port during the last 5 years. As a result, air cooling solution, which was conventionally used for QSFP-DD, is no longer adequate to manage the increasing thermal loads. More advanced cooling solutions, such as water-cooled cold plate are needed. In the current work, a series of tests and simulations were conducted on QSFP-DD air-cooled heat sink and water-cooled cold plate applications based on the optimizations done in prior publications. The study provided a guideline to meet the thermal design targets for QSFP-DD.