Enhancement in CMOS chip performance through microfluidic cooling

High on-chip temperature can degrade chip performance, and increase high leakage power which contributes to a significant part of the total chip power consumption. Microfluidic cooling is believed to have better cooling ability than air cooling. However, very few experimental demonstrations of CMOS chips with integrated microfluidic cooling exist. This paper presents experimental results of a working CMOS chip capable of generating controllable heat and on-chip temperature sensing under air cooling and microfluidic cooling. Under natural air cooling, the leakage current increases exponentially by 1.9 X as the temperature increases from 26.3 °C to 57.6 °C. 18.8 °C temperature drop and 66.2% leakage current saving is achieved by microfluidic cooling compared to natural air cooling at heatflux 34.5 W/cm². In addition, the time to reach a steady state in response to a sudden application of microfluidic cooling is only 48.5% of that of forced air cooling. Lastly, increasing the flow rate of microfluidic cooling does not decrease the temperature and leakage current much.