Thermoelectric mini-contact cooler for hot-spot removal in high power devices

Cooling hot-spots with high heat flux (e.g., >1000W/cm² ) is becoming one of the most important technical challenge facing today´s IC industry. More aggressive thermal solutions, than would be required for uniform heating, are highly desired. Solid state thermoelectric coolers (TECs) have received recent attention for hot-spot thermal management. However, present day TECs typically have cooling flux much lower than heat flux in the hot-spots. In this work, we reported an innovative technique - TE mini-contact - to significantly increase cooling flux of TECs for the application in hot-spot cooling. A chip package featuring a TE mini-contact cooler integrated with conventional integrated heat spreader (IHS) and heat sink is designed. The cooling performance of such chip package has been investigated by using a 3-D numeric model. It is found that the cooling in the hot-spot (1250W/cm², 400 mum by 400 mum) can be about 19degC better in the proposed package than that achieved in the conventional chip package without TEC. The effects of trench, die thickness, and TEC misalignment on the cooling of the hot-spot are also discussed