A More Powerful Chip with Transistor-Integrated Cooling

Managing the heat generated in electronics is a big challenge. Typically electronic technologies, designed by electrical engineers, and cooling systems, designed by mechanical engineers, are done independently and separately. Researchers at EPFL  have now developed an integrated microfluidic cooling technology together with the electronics, which can efficiently manage the large heat fluxes generated by transistors. The research could lead to even more compact electronic devices and enable the integration of power converters, with several high-voltage devices, into a single chip.

Transcript

00:00:00 so research is about thermal management of electronics this is a major problem today especially with the constant push to make components even smaller and integrated on the same chip so to extract the heat or the high heat fluxes that you have in these chips become even more of a problem so what we

00:00:21 proposed was to make an electronic chip where the electronics happen at the top of the chip and just near with the electronics flow where the electrons flow we have this microfluidic channels underneath that enables the further miniaturization of electronics as well as the integration of several of these components together so

00:00:46 in order to make a chip where we could extract such high heat fluxes we had to develop a new fabrication method in the clean room here at epfl to fabricate chips where we have a network of channels a three-dimensional network where liquid flows up and down to very tiny channels right at the

00:01:04 surface of the chip and in order to make this we developed this process where we take a chip and first we etch holes from the top that we are later filling up while we're depositing all the metal that is required to conduct the electricity and then from the back side of the chip we also add channels that are used for distributing the liquid over the entire

00:01:23 surface of the chip so inside this setup we can put a single chip that we fabricated inside the clean room i put it here inside this testing section we connect it to a flow of liquid so liquid flows through these tubes until it enters the chip where it goes through there and it cools down the device

00:01:38 and in the meantime there's an infrared camera that is being used to measure the temperature at the surface of the chip so we can see how well it is actually cooling down the device so there are several future prospects of this kind of technologies first we can look in terms of the electronics having this efficient cooling to extract the

00:01:57 heat enables us to integrate several components in the same chip and in terms of cooling up to now we've been using a liquid phase cooling so it could be water could be dielectric coolants and there is a certain limitation on the amount of heat fluxes that you can extract

00:02:15 using this kind of fluids and there are several applications where you would like to extract higher heat fluxes so there are several prospects for the future of this [Music] technology