Thermal characterization methodologies for experimental minichannel heat sink designs in printed circuit board assemblies

Abstract

There has been a growing demand for novel, highly efficient, power-saving cooling solutions in recent years. In many cases, standard cooling techniques offer only limited opportunities to prevent the overheating of circuits. Such issues concern high-speed Printed Circuit Board Assemblies (PCBA) in data centers and telecommunication racks, where the flow of the cooling medium is obstructed due to the lack of space. Size limitations can also be a serious problem when cooling high-power devices because the devices consume a large space. Since the heat sink-based cooling solutions and the sophisticated IC packages only deal with one possible heat flow path, we were given the idea of enhancing the secondary heat flow path towards the Printed Circuit Board (PCB). Led by this intention, the idea of creating an embedded minichannel system inside the circuit board and circulating the cooling agent was realized. Through this method, we could decrease the board-to-ambient thermal resistance significantly. This paper presents the demonstration and feasibility study of this method. One of the main aims of this study is to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed concept in PCBAs, where the primary concerns are the low-cost manufacturability and available space. The other goal is to create an adaptation of the standard thermal characterization methodologies to deal with the specific dissipating components in the PCBA demonstrators. In the first part, the manufacturing technology is elaborated on, and its efficiency is characterized by thermal transient testing and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. For these use cases, it was noted that the cumulative thermal resistance decreased by approximately 60 % when a volumetric flow rate of 100 ccm was applied in the minichannels. In the second part, a more sophisticated technology demonstration is realized and characterized by adding the proposed embedded minichannel heat sink to an existing high-speed PCBA. A specific thermal transient testing was implemented specifically for this use case, and it was carried out on programmable logic devices by utilizing general-purpose programmable logic to construct the necessary measurement methods. In the future, this feature can be used in different logic circuit designs where it is not possible to determine the junction temperature directly.