Project description
Direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology to boost electronics thermal management
The EU-funded UniScool project plans to develop a patented liquid cooling system that can be embedded into a chip to address thermal management issues faced by the ICT industry. This innovative system will use thermally activated fins that adapt to varying heat loads, preventing overcooling and reducing pump power needs. With the potential to boost heat extraction capacity up to 1 kW/cm2, the proposed system also promises significant reductions in flow rate and power consumption and a tenfold reduction in space usage. Together with Women TechEU, UniScool will demonstrate a prototype of this in-chip liquid cooling solution. This prototype could potentially encourage semiconductor manufacturers to integrate UniScool’s technology into their microelectronic components for more sustainable and efficient thermal management.
Objective
The continuous increase in power density of integrated circuits due to the ever-increasing rate of data and communications and the constant push for size and cost reduction settles thermal management as a big concern for the ICT industry. Consequently, cooling, with its enormous consumption of electricity and water has an increasingly large environmental impact, and new technologies to extract the heat in a more sustainable way are committed. A promising approach for more efficient thermal management is to directly embed liquid cooling inside the chip, eliminating the thermal resistance between the semiconductor die and the packaging.
UniScool proposes a new patented and highly innovative liquid cooling system, based on an adaptive heat sink that includes a series of thermally activated fins capable of efficiently adapting the local heat extraction to time-dependent and non-uniform heat load scenarios, providing high-temperature uniformity without a custom design stage, avoiding overcooling and reducing the required pumping power, what provides an added-value solution that improves the existing ones. But with this project, we aim to go further and enter a new leading thermal management paradigm by developing an embedded liquid cooling system at the chip stack with the advantages of self-adaptive fins. This solution can boost the heat extraction capacity of the system up to more than 1kW/cm2 with significantly reduced flow rate and pumping power consumption (x 0.5) high performance, and significantly reduced space (x10) in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way.
With Women TechEU, we aim to do a prototype demonstration of in-chip liquid cooling, embedded at the chip stack, based on a microchannel array with self-adaptive fins that regulate the local thermal resistance according to local temperature, which can be an open door for semiconductor manufacturers to believe in in-chip cooling and incorporate UniSCool solution in their microelectronic components.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.2 - European innovation ecosystems Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
25003 Lleida
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.