Researchers at IBM Corp. in New York are reportedly examining potential ways to directly integrate liquid cooling into microchip designs and packaging to help “close the gap” between the chip and chip-cooling technologies in high performance military electronic systems.
The IBM project is part of DARPA’s Intrachip/Interchip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool) program, which seeks to “overcome the limitations of remove cooling” by exploring embedded thermal management technologies. IBM is reportedly the first company awarded a contract for the ICECool Fundamentals program.
The ICECool Fundamentals program, the first phase in the ICECool program, will focus on “demonstrating the microfabrication techniques needed to implement evaporative microfluidics in multiply-microchanneled semiconductor wafers and studying, modeling, and correlating the thermofluidic characteristics of evaporative flows in such microchannel flow loops within individual chips and/or in the microgaps between chips in 3D stacks.”
In the first phase of the DARPA ICECool program, IBM researchers will experiment with integrating liquid cooling technology into the chip layout, substrate structure and package design in order to shrink on-chip cooling and enhance overall electronics performance.
