Thermo-mechanical design challenges in silicon validation platforms

Rapid advances in the semiconductor process technology have led to miniaturization of transistor features and advent of multi-core architecture. At the silicon-level while bus speeds, features and functionalities are increasing, at the system-level, there is a steady and incessant trend of volume reduction, compact component placement on the board and noise reduction. These silicon and system trends make the thermo-mechanical designs challenging. Validation platforms are used to validate microprocessors/chipsets to ensure world-class quality and reliable Intel products. These platforms usually have an open chassis to allow ease of accessibility for silicon debug. In this paper, we present the design challenges and opportunities faced in validation from thermo-mechanical perspective. The requirements for sockets, nominal cooling thermal solutions, temperature margining thermal tools, and limited Keep-Out-Volume (KOV) on the motherboard create significant challenges in designing mechanical retention mechanism for sockets, thermal and thermal tools. We present the design methodology of active air cooling coupled with mechanical retention. We also demonstrate the design challenges and innovations of peltier-based temperature margining thermal tools used for fault detection acceleration. These methodologies can serve as Best Known Methods (BKMs) for delivering novel designs for nominal cooling and temperature margining thermal tools to address the small factor, dense pad-pitch, high pin-count and high TDP challenges of validation platforms.