Integration of micro-contact enhanced thermoelectric cooler with a FEEDS manifold-microchannel system for cooling of high flux electronics

Two-phase microchannel cooling has demonstrated substantial performance enhancement for thermal management of high-power electronics, offering remarkable heat removal capability without imposing high pumping power penalties. However, similar to other bulk cooling methods, this method alone too has difficulty in addressing remediation of local hotspots. Thermoelectric coolers, on the other hand, are scalable and perfectly suited for localized cooling. Thus in this paper, we report our work on integration of a micro-contact enhanced TEC with FEEDS (thin-Film Evaporation and Enhanced fluid Delivery System) manifold-micro channel system. Combining these two thermal management schemes into a single system can provide effective heat removal over the entire electronic chip surface. Integration of these two methods, however, poses several challenges, including hermetic sealing, wiring of the TEC, excessive joule heating in electrical traces, and thermal/electrical short-circuits. Thus, the aim of this study was to integrate an optimized, 3 mm x 0.8 mm TEC into a FEEDS manifold-microchannel system to create a reliable high flux cooling mechanism on a silicon or silicon carbide chip for cooling of 5kW/cm2 hotspot and 1kW/cm2 background heat fluxes. The manufacturing, integration configuration, and assembly of the system are discussed in this paper. A numerical model of the system is built and simulated using the commercial finite-element analysis software ANSYS. Preliminary numerical results demonstrated that with 30 °C temperature rise at the SiC chip's background surface, less than 35 °C hotspot temperature rise with respect to the coolant fluid temperature (110 °C) can be achieved.