Cooling for high heat flux VLSI systems

Recent projections have suggested that heat fluxes may possibly reach 100 W/cm² in future integrated circuit chips. The authors first discuss these projections and outline some of the problems associated with getting these power levels into high density packages for integrated systems. The authors then address the problem of getting the resulting heat back out of the package and look at the potential of liquid cooling including direct immersion and jet impingement. Recent results indicate that both modes of cooling will be highly useful in the cooling and packaging technology for the next generation of high performance computing systems. Finally, novel applications of micro-electronic fabrication processes to cooling high density multichip substrates and to fundamental heat transfer measurement are discussed