Thermal considerations for systems with high speed memories

The demand for high performance systems is rising. Whether to look at the high resolution and color depth requirements of upcoming display generations, high bandwidth network communication, or at high performance computing in general, to need to transfer data as fast as possible inside a system is crucial. A crucial aspect is the memory/processor interface, which faces multiple challenges such as signal integrity and high density interconnect routing within the assembly. Furthermore, thermal considerations become more and more relevant as temperature influences the systems behavior and electrical behavior dramatically. The goal of this paper is to illustrate important thermal aspects of a high performance system. We use a demonstrator where one ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) and one memory with high speed interfaces are assembled onto a silicon interposer placed on a PCB. Different options to remove the heat from the system are investigated. Because cooling solutions could be very expensive they should be considered in very early design cycles. To handle thermal issues in high performance systems we added a heat sink solution to the system, which results in a noticeable reduction of the peak temperature.