Compact Model Based Microfluidic Controller for Energy Efficient Thermal Management Using Single Tier and Three Dimensional Stacked Pin Fin Enhanced Microgap

Abstract

Overcooling of electronic devices and systems results in excess energy consumption, which can be reduced by closely linking cooling requirements with actual power dissipation. A thermal modelbased flow rate controller for single phase liquid cooled single tier and threedimensional (3D) stacked chips, using pinfin enhanced microgap was studied in this paper. Thermal compact models of a planar and 3D stacked twolayer pinfin enhanced microgap were developed, which ran 104105 times faster than using fullfield computational fluid dynamics/heat transfer (CFD/HT) method, with reasonable accuracy and spatial details. Compact model was used in conjunction with a flow rate control strategy to provide the needed amount of liquid to cool the heat sources to the desired temperature range. Example case studies show that the estimated energy savings in pump power is about 25% compared with pumping fluid at a constant flow rate.