Experimental investigation of direct liquid cooling of a two-die package

Recent commercial efforts have reestablished the benefits of cooling server modules using direct liquid cooling (DLC) technology. The primary drivers behind this technology are the increase in chip densities and the absolute need to reduce the overall data center power usage. In DLC technology, a cold plate is situated on top of the chip with thermal interface material between the chip and the cold plate. The low thermal resistance path facilitates the use of warm water which helps data centers in replacing the chilled water system by a water side economizer utilizing ambient temperature. This work describes the effort to leverage DLC by employing microchannel cold plates to cool multi-chip modules. The primary objective of this work is to build a sophisticated test rig to characterize the flow and thermal performance of a microchannel cold plate for cooling a two-die chip. This study highlights the challenges of building an experimental setup which simulates a two-die chip package and the approaches taken to overcome the challenges. A parallel channel cold plate is used to benchmark the performance. Tests were conducted for a set of independent variables like flow rate, input power to dice, coolant temperature, flow direction and TIM resistance. The results are presented as PQ curves, specific thermal resistance curves and case temperature distribution reflecting the effect of changing the input variables.