Integrating a microfluidic cooling system in the heart of a power chip improves cooling performance by a factor of 50, Swiss researchers found.
As sophisticated as modern semiconductor devices have become over the years, their thermal management hasn’t changed much. Cooling is a matter of getting the heat away from the belly of the chip and directing it towards a device that disperses it into the environment. In a PC or notebook processor, for example, the heat produced by the billions of transistors is led to an air-cooled heat sink.
This way of heat extraction is fundamentally limited by the thermal resistance between the semiconductor die and its packaging: there’s only so much heat you can rid get off. It’s also inefficient, as cooling requires relatively large amounts of energy. And, of course, bulky heat sinks take up a lot of space, which in many electronic products is a scarce resource.
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