Cooling of Electronic Chips Using Microchannel and Micro-Pin Fin Heat Exchangers

The research community is experiencing a revolution in microscale and nanoscale heat transfer, with a focus on developing fundamental experiments and theoretical techniques. More recently, these advancements have begun to influence the design of electronic systems. A futuristic electronic cooling solution might include high efficiency thermoelectric devices made from nanomaterials for the cooling of hotspots on a chip, nano/micro particle laden thermal interface materials and micro-pin fin/microchannel based heat exchanger. Liquid cooling using integrated microscale heat exchangers is a promising future technology to address issues associated with integrated circuit thermal management. In this paper recent advances made by us on technology development of microchannel/micro-pin-fin heat exchangers is presented. Particular attention is given to the impact of hotspots on the performance of microchannel cooling.