Control Principles and On-Chip Circuits for Active Cooling Using Integrated Superlattice-Based Thin-Film Thermoelectric Devices

Superlattice thin-film thermoelectric coolers (TECs) are emerging as a promising technology for hot spot mitigation in microprocessors. This paper studies the prospect of on-demand cooling with advanced TECs integrated at the back of the heat spreader inside a package (integrated TEC). Using thermal compact models of the chip and package with integrated TECs, the control principles for TEC-assisted transient cooling are presented. The control principles are implemented in a 130-nm CMOS process and cosimulated with the thermal system to show their feasibility and energy overheads. The simulation results show potential for extending the time for which a chip and package can sustain a high power load.