The ICECool Fundamentals Effort on Evaporative Cooling of Microelectronics
Avram Bar‐Cohen, Mehdi Asheghi, Timothy Chainer, Suresh V. Garimella, Kenneth E. Goodson, Catherine Gorlé, Raphael Mandel, Joseph Maurer, Michael Ohadi, James W. Palko, Pritish R. Parida, Yoav Peles, Joel L. Plawsky, Mark Schultz, Justin A. Weibel, Yogendra Joshi
Abstract
The Intrachip Enhanced Cooling Fundamentals (ICECool Fun) effort was launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the leadership of Dr. Avram Bar-Cohen during 2012–2015 to target an order of magnitude improvement in chip level and hot spot heat fluxes, compared to the then state-of-the-art (SOA). Evaporative cooling technologies to achieve potential targets of 1 kW/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> at the chip level and 5 kW/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> at the hot spot level were targeted. A key goal was to improve fundamental understanding of the evaporative cooling physics at the relevant scales, and a numerical modeling capability to enable the co-design of such solutions in emerging computing and communications systems. A summary of the five projects pursued under this effort is provided, including the key accomplishments and developed capabilities.