Thermal Challenge of chip
The power consumed by semiconductors generates heat, which must be removed from the equipment, but how to effectively achieve this is an increasingly challenging task. As the density of transistors increases, this becomes more difficult.
The materials and design themselves have the potential for improvement, as they can carry more heat away through the conduction of heat dissipation equipment. The challenge is that unless we use large servers, the thermal space around these devices is very small. You must consider material improvement, intelligent utilization of thermal space around chips, packaging, or PCBs. What you really want to do is improve the conductivity and heat transfer rate.
Heat can escape through the top of the package and then enter the heat sink, or be exported through the bottom and its connected PCB. When space is limited, things become even more difficult. Depending on the specific design, this goal can be achieved in different ways. For example, in smartphones, the use of highly conductive films such as graphite or graphene films is very common due to the smallest system volume and effective heat dissipation. In the field of infrastructure, the use of active and passive 3D soaking plates can achieve operation within a range of hundreds of watts.
On a single chip, we perform timing and power verification at the netlist level. In the context of 3D-IC, this may become impractical, so resistance characteristics of chips through thermal models, in order to understand every geometric detail present in the chip. Ultimately, it combines design and packaging, and some chip models are generated in this way.
Many chips face thermal barriers, and solving this problem is not easy. We can design and manufacture incredible chips, but they will melt. This is not a manufacturing limitation, nor is it a design limitation. This is a physical limitation, and we cannot emit more heat. Although unique solutions can be used in certain applications, most markets must find ways to do more with fewer resources, which means more functionality per watt. The cost associated with this is much greater than previous solutions.
