Experimental and Numerical Study of 3-D Printed Direct Jet Impingement Cooling for High-Power, Large Die Size Applications
Tiwei Wei, Herman Oprins, Vladimir Cherman, Zhi Yang, Kathryn C. Rivera, G. Van der Plas, B. J. Pawlak, Luke England, Eric Beyne, Martine Baelmans
Abstract
In this article, we design, demonstrate, and characterize a 3-D printed package-level polymer jet impingement cooling solution on a 23×23 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> thermal test chip. The experimental hardware results for a nozzle pitch of 2 mm show that, with 1-kW power dissipation, at a coolant (deionized (DI) water) flow rate of 3 liters per minute (LPM), the measured average chip temperature increase is ~65 °C with a cooler pressure drop of 0.15 bar between the inlet and outlet connections. It is also shown that bare die cooling without lid [and thermal interface material (TIM)] shows better cooling performance than the lidded package. Second, an advanced 3-D printed manifold with an additional flow redistribution structure is demonstrated. The experimental results show that the improved design achieves a better chip temperature uniformity compared to the reference design, showing a reduction of the chip temperature gradient with a factor of 4 and 2.3 for a flow rate of 0.5 and 3 LPM, respectively, while no significant impact on the cooler pressure drop was measured. The numerical modeling studies predict an additional 15.4% thermal performance improvement, by reducing the nozzle pitch from 2 to 1 mm, for a flow rate of 3 LPM.