Adaptive Cooling of Integrated Circuits Using Digital Microfluidics

Put yourself at the cutting edge of adaptive on-the-fly cooling techniques for integrated circuits with this definitive introduction to the droplet-based technology blazing the way. Straight from the research group pioneering digital microfluidics, the book demonstrates its feasibility as an enabling platform both theoretically and experimentally, and presents architectural and implementation methodologies together with prototypes for delivering discrete droplets in a reconfigurable manner to any hot-spot, with spatial resolutions comparable to the hot-spot footprint itself. After reviewing cooling principles and current methods, this groundbreaking work delivers a comprehensive framework for droplet-based systems that can selectively and adaptively improve heat transfer from localized hot-spots. It introduces design methodology for a droplet-based architecture, and explains how to characterize heat transfer of droplets experimentally and ways to implement various feedback methods required for closed-loop control of adaptive cooling. You'll find methods for, and demonstrations of, both simple hot-spot cooling and adaptive hot-spot cooling illustrating the effects of effective flow-rate and hot-spot power density. Moreover, the design and fabrication of several droplet-based cooling prototypes provide an invaluable starting point for your own efforts in tackling thermal issues in chip design. Supported with 70 illustrations and photographs, this definitive work puts state-of-the-art advances at your fingertips that will prove invaluable in tackling high power dissipation and thermal profiles that current methods cannot adequately address.