I-Corps: Embedded Cooling

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project's technology has its basis in a range of microfluidic cooling products. The potential of the technology is its positive impacts on several computing technologies where it may expand the limits of processing frequency and therefore system speed/performance. Commercial applications that can benefit from the project's technology are broad, such as those requiring the acceleration of high-performance computing in data centers, graphics computing in the fields of artificial intelligence, self-driving transportation, videogame hardware, digital currency (blockchain) technology, augmented and virtual reality, among others. The I-Corps customer discovery activities will also provide useful insights into other potential markets for this project's cooling technology, confirming if there is a need/interest by other industries, such as lasers, concentrated solar photovoltaics, and thermoelectric products, among many potential markets that use liquid-cooling systems at some level. This I-Corps project is motivated by a technology that consists of an embedded microfluidic cooling layer that offers significantly enhanced heat removal capabilities when compared with current thermal hardware -- this is as a result of eliminating the thermal interfaces and heat spreaders commonly used in microelectronic devices. The heat removal is directly managed by bonding the microfluidic cooling layer to the silicon chip surface through a metallic joint. The resulting micro-cooling layer replaces the need for the heat spreader used in current technologies since the microstructures embedded in the cooling layer have the appropriate feature sizes and layout with an appropriate flow distribution through engineered manifolds for effective heat dissipation. This technology provides the capability of unlocking the clock frequency on micro-processing units by allowing the input of higher voltages to the computing cores, while also keeping the device temperature below design limits. Laboratory experimentation with these microfluidic cooling layers under a wide variety of operating conditions and refrigerants has demonstrated capabilities for removing heat fluxes of up to 500 W/cm2; a 5x increase when compared with the current maximum heat fluxes of commercial, high-end central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.