“Cool” Micro-Technologies Make Hot Chips Chill

“Cool” Micro-Technologies Make Hot Chips Chill

At the BroadGroup Power and Cooling Summit here today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers presented an innovative approach for improving the cooling of computer chips, an increasingly urgent need given the large amount of heat released by today’s more powerful processors and the additional energy required for removing that heat. The technique, called “high thermal conductivity interface technology,” allows a twofold improvement in heat removal over current methods. This paves the way for continued development of creative electronic products through the use of more powerful chips without complex and costly systems simply to cool them.

As chip performance continues to progress according to Moore’s Law, efficient chip cooling has become one of the most vexing problems for designers of electronic products. The IBM technique outlined today is one of several being explored by scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory to address the issue. “Electronic products are capable of amazing things, largely because of the more powerful chips at their heart,” said Bruno Michel, manager of the Advanced Thermal Packaging research group at IBM’s Zurich lab. “We want to help electronics makers keep the innovations coming. Our chip-cooling technology is just one tool at our disposal to help them do that.”

The approach used by IBM addresses the connection point between the hot chip and the various cooling components used today to draw the heat away, including heat sinks. Special particle-filled viscous pastes are typically applied to this interface to guarantee that chips can expand and contract owing to the thermal cycling. This paste is kept as thin as possible in order to transport heat from chip to the cooling components efficiently. Yet, squeezing these pastes too thin between the cooling components and chip would damage or even crack the chip if the conventional technologies are used.

Using sophisticated micro-technology, the IBM researchers developed a chip cap with a network of tree-like branched channels on its surface. The pattern is designed such that when pressure is applied, the paste spreads much more evenly and the pressure remains uniform across the chip, allowing the right uniformity to be obtained with nearly two times less pressure, and a ten times better heat transport through the interface.

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