Integration technologies for immersion cooling in microelectronics

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The proposed project is a research collaboration between the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS), Systemex Energy inc. and Varitron Technologies inc., to develop a new type of highly efficient cooling technology for advanced electronic devices. This cooling technology is based on immersing the semiconductor device into a dielectric liquid, to benefit from its vaporization phase change to carry heat away from the device efficiently. This approach has been studied before, in relatively simple implementations which clearly demonstrates its impressive thermal performances. However, immersion cooling has not yet reached its full potential because of two technological issues, both related to an incomplete scientific understanding of the phenomena involved in immersion cooling. The first issue is the so-called boiling crisis, a complex phenomenon involving the flux of heat, liquid and vapor which limits the thermal performances and create stability issues. The second issue is the reliability risk created by immersing electronic components which have not been designed for this purpose, and which might be subjected to new failure mechanisms because of immersion. Here, we propose to study at a fundamental level both the boiling crisis and the reliability risk, to develop precisely engineered immersion hardware which can be rigorously shown to be efficient, stable and reliable. The project will used advanced experimental techniques and simulation methods to contribute to the scientific understanding of cooling by boiling. The cooling technology will be developed and tested on industrial-scale manufacturing equipment at C2MI, so it can be produced cost-effectively in a well integrated packaging process, with an eventual expedited transfer of the new technology to the industry. The kinetics of failure mechanisms will be measured experimentally, and will be interpreted with respect to chemical interactions and thermomechanical phenomena in the immersed hardware.****