Cooling Orthogonally Packaged Switch Architectures

This paper presents an air and a liquid cooling solution for a specific arrangement of an orthogonal card-packaging architecture with the front-side electronics cards arranged vertically that does not rely on passing cooling air through the midplane. A front-to-back air cooling architecture concept is presented that uses a unique fan card to deliver air to the rear of the chassis, blow it across the rear-mounted switch cards and discharge it out the back. Thermal analyses show this air-cooling concept may cool up to two 200W switch cards. The liquid cooling solution that is presented further extends the switch card cooling capacity by transporting the heat to another rack location where it can be dissipated with a front-to-back airflow, thereby uncoupling the thermal and electrical packaging