Chip liquid cooling thermal solution
The increasing transistor density reduces the power consumption of the chip, but the high density of transistors will make the heat more concentrated, and the problem of heat dissipation can not be ignored. The heat dissipation of high-performance chips has always plagued everyone, including enterprises. In addition to the traditional air cooling + air conditioning combination, liquid cooling is also a very efficient choice. However, air conditioning and air cooling will bring huge energy consumption. Microsoft chose to put the data center server into the sea to improve the efficiency of heat dissipation.
The difficulty of installing liquid cooling on the chip is to integrate the liquid channel directly into the design of the chip. Researchers believe that the future solution is to let water flow between sandwich circuits. Although it sounds simple, it is very difficult to operate in practice. At present, immersion in non-conductive liquid for heat dissipation is very useful for chips using stacking technology, but using this technology in traditional chips will become very expensive and difficult to achieve mass production.
The TSMC proposed three different silicon channels and conducted relevant simulation tests. In the first direct water cooling method, water will have its own circulation channel and be directly etched into the chip; The second is that the water channel is etched to the silicon layer on the top of the chip, and the thermal interface material (TIM) layer of ox (silicon oxide fusion) is used to transfer heat from the chip to the water cooling layer; The last one is to replace the thermal interface material layer with simple and cheap liquid metal. In terms of effect, the first method is the best and the second method is the second.
Chip liquid cooling is an important direction to solve semiconductor heat dissipation in the future. After all, higher density transistors and 3D Packaging Technology in the future will make the chip heat from plane to three-dimensional, which will not only make the heat more concentrated, but also multi-layer stacking will make the heat transfer more difficult. In the face of increasingly concentrated heat dissipation problems, chip water cooling and heat dissipation scheme may be a good way to solve the problem of chip thermal issues.
