Performance improvements of air-cooled thermal tool with advanced technologies

Air-cooled based thermal margining tool is simple, less costly and reliable cooling solution compared to liquid-cooled thermal tool. Air-cooled thermal tool is used by many Intel® groups for different purposes such as CPU, chipset or ASIC debug and validation. However, conventional air-cooled thermal margining tool do not provide sufficient cooling due to the increasing challenges in thermal management, such as form factor constraint, high power density and noise level limitation. High performance cooling technologies need to be investigated to meet the increasing demand for thermal performance. This paper introduces four advanced cooling strategies, their implementation and ongoing prototyping efforts to achieve performance improvement for air-cooled thermal tool design. In specific, this paper studies the optimization of heat sink design with different fin materials, different embedded heat pipe sizes and numbers, vapor chamber base, liquid chamber base, and combinations of different cooling technologies. The results show that copper fin with liquid chamber base and four φ8mm heat pipes provide the best thermal performance among all the technologies studied.