Active Fluidic Cooling on Energy Constrained System-on-Chip Systems

This paper presents design, experimental characterization, and feasibility analysis of integrated in-package fluidic cooling for mobile systems-on-chips (SoCs). A pin fin interposer for fluidic cooling is designed and integrated with a commercial SoC. The demonstrated system integrates an active low-power piezoelectric pump controlled by the SoC itself and a metal/acrylic-based board-scale heat spreader and exchanger. Different software-based policies in the SoC for controlling the fluid flow based on SoC's temperature and performance are implemented and compared. The measurement results demonstrate that the in-package fluidic cooling improves the SoC's energy efficiency and reduces design footprint compared to external passive cooling.