BEAT THE HEAT

PAPER SUBMITTED BY,

HARIGANESH VENKATARAMANAN PSG COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY COIMBATORE-641004

ABSTRACT
Of all the issues facing chip and computer designers, none is more burning than the soaring levels of power flowing through integrated circuits Chip designers, computer makers and assorted university researchers are uniting to tackle one of the most urgent, but overlooked potential showstoppers looming for the global semiconductor industry: the soaring densities of heat in integrated circuits, particularly high-performance microprocessors.

Introduction
Of all the issues facing chip and computer designers, none is more burning than the soaring levels of power flowing through integrated circuits Chip designers, computer makers and assorted university researchers are uniting to tackle one of the most urgent, but overlooked potential showstoppers looming for the global semiconductor industry: the soaring densities of heat in integrated circuits, particularly high-performance microprocessors.

Junction Temperature Prediction

The chip junction temperature in an actual computer environment can be predicted using

Tj = Tambient + dTairheating + dTcase-air +dTj-case

The parameters are given by: Tambient dTairheating dT case-air - system level parameters - machine ambient, altitude - system level parameters - air-flow rate, air density, humidity board level parameters - component location, power of upstream components, board thermal properties - system level parameters - air-flow rate - board level parameters - air flow distribution, convection coefficient, board thermal properties - component level parameters - package construction, chip power - air flow distribution, convection coefficient, board system level

dT j-case

parameters - air-flow rate - board level parameters thermal properties - component level parameters - package construction, chip power

Intel processor heat output

Two years ago, Patrick Gel singer, chief technology officer of Intel, used a nowfamous speech to compare the increasing energy density of chips over the coming decade to hot plates, rocket nozzles, nuclear reactors and, ultimately, the surface of the sun. For the latest Pentium Itanium processor, the energy to be dissipated is around 35 watts per square centimeterequivalent to a hot plate. In straight forward terms, you could fry an egg on top of any of these chips. Problems over the heat generated by semiconductors are becoming so severe that they threaten to slow, or even limit, the development of the entire chip industry. Andrew Grove (chairman of Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company) states that power consumption on board the latest generation of microprocessors is becoming a limiter of integration. In short, the industry's mantrafaster, cheaper, smalleris under threat.

Given that the doubling of chip performance every 18 months (Moore's Law) has underpinned growth in the information-technology business for the past 40 years, anything that threatens to alter that blissful state could rewrite the rules of the industry. The same is true for laptop computersnotorious battery fails at the best of times. There is little point in buying the latest DVD-equipped wide-screen laptop if the battery runs out, before the movie that you are watching reaches its dramatic climax. There is a safety issue, too. A Swedish scientist learned the hard way that laptop computers do not quite live up to their name. He spent an evening writing a report, periodically shifting position to avoid heat from the machine. The next day he woke up to find himself blistered in a very sensitive place. The laptop's microprocessor was using the bottom of the case as a heat sink, causing a gentle rise in temperature. Heat hurts performance because transistors run faster when they're cool rather than hot. That's why power-mad "high speeders," in search of an additional 2030 percent of switching speed, clap custom heat sinks and cryogenic refrigeration systems onto the microprocessors in their self made-up PCs. Heat, or rather repeated cycling from hot to cool, also shortens the life of the chip. And nowhere is that energy more obvious than in the racks and racks of servers in large data centers. It is calculated that future big data centers, 1000 racks or larger, might need 10 MW to run the computers and a further 5 MW just to keep them cool enough to operate. A truly global approach would examine the ultimate cost of cooling. You might start with the aluminum in a typical heat sink, which takes nearly a kilowatt of electricity

to smelt, and then move to the energy used by a computer's multiple fans. Throw in the cost of air-conditioning the office building and pretty soon you're talking really large energy.

METHODS TO CONTROL THE HEAT GENERATION Heat sink

Computing has coasted on the fan and heat sink for quite some time. Indeed, for many in the electronics industry during much of the last decade, there was little urgency in the quest for new thermal management technology. That was thanks to the switch, in the 1980s, from ICs built using bipolar transistors to chips using today's technology, CMOS.

Perhaps the biggest bottleneck in air-cooling technology is getting the heat from the chip to the heat sink. Blocking the flow of heat are the interface between the chip itself and the lid of the chip package, if there is one, and the interface between the lid and the heat sink Merely pressing the heat sink against the package lid will not do the trick, because microscopic roughness on both components makes for a joint full of air pockets, highly resistant to the flow of heat.

Historically, a common solution has been to fill one or both interfaces with solder, which is what the makers of power electronics systems still do. But this solution is not without its drawbacks. For one, you can't break a soldered connection without breaking the chip, which makes prototyping difficult. Even more troubling, a hard connection is liable to fail after a few thousand cycles of heat-induced expansion and contraction. That's why most manufacturers resort to a thin layer of grease or "goop" technical jargon for thermal pasteas an interface that is soft enough to withstand expansion and contraction. Thermal paste consists of a bonding agent, say, mineral oil or epoxy, and a filler, such as silica or some more exotic substance. The filler does most of the job of conducting heat; the bonding agent holds it together and ensures that no microscopic air gaps remain between the chip and the lid or the lid and the heat sink. The problem is that the more filler you add to improve conductivity, the thicker the goop becomes, making it unable to fill all the gaps. The latest discovery is decidedly unmelodic nano filler: soot. Plain polyethylene glycol, a water-soluble emulsifier used in everything from toothpaste to printing inks, is filled with carbon blacksuperfine soot. This makes a thin paste that conducts heat 50 percent better than tin-based solders do and a lot better than any existing brand of goop does. Everybody assumes that to get good paste, one must make its internal heat conductivity as high as possible, but what's important is spread ability. You need the right grade30-nanometer particles that form agglomerations that look like clusters of grapes and are squish able, so that they flatten under compression to conform well to the surface topography of the chip and heat sink.

Evaporation technique
Evaporative cooling was implemented two years ago by Cray Inc., Seattle, in its X1 supercomputer, and today it is used in the SV2 model also. The system, sprays a fluorocarbon fluid that has a boiling point of 56 C. As the microscopic droplets boil off, the bubbles create nucleation points for more bubbles to form. Result: even faster boiling, letting the system sweat off 45 W/cm2. How this large system is be mass-produced for use in PCs. This project, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), uses microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication techniques to fashion a plate not much bigger than the chip itself but employing many tiny spray guns that bond directly to the chip Each nozzle shoots 100-micrometer droplets of a fluorine-based dielectric fluid at the chip's hot spots, metering the flow according to the temperature inferred from the switching speed of local transistors. The liquid boils, carrying off a big dollop of energy in the gas, which flows to a condenser. The condensate is then pumped back to the spray nozzles by a micro pump. Best of all, as a cooling system, the technology is self-governing, working especially well precisely where it is needed most. That's because a dielectric fluid with the proper boiling point provides cooling at just the right temperature, and because it boils off faster in the hotter areas, reducing the temperature differential across the chip. Such differentials cause some parts of the chip to expand more than others, pulling the circuitry apart at the seams. Moreover, surface tension tends to suck liquid to the hotter, faster-drying parts.

The system would, however, require some basic rethinking. For one thing, to preserve the coolant, the package must be hermetically sealed. The slightest leak would cause the remaining coolant to boil off even faster, and the chip would fail catastrophically. For another, the nozzle array would have to be designed concurrently with the chip, both to ensure that the chip's hot spots are spread out and to optimize the control of each nozzle. The system, together with other heat-conducting concepts, was backed by DARPA in part because the military wants wearable computers that won't get fouled by mud or dust, as they would if they depended on a fan. And what's good for your PC may be good for you, too, someday: a few of the concepts DARPA is studying may even pave the way to air-conditioned uniforms for desert commandos or urban firefighters, and airconditioned clothing for hot, cranky city dwellers.

Attacking the root

While some researchers focus on siphoning heat from chips, another group is constantly striving to minimize it in the first place. The biggest such improvement was the switch to CMOS from bipolar transistors in the late 1980s, and another big switch may soon be in the offing. In the last couple of years, major chip makers have been working on materials, such as hafnium dioxide, called high-k dielectrics. This class of materials saves power by essentially eliminating "vertical leakage"that is, the seepage of current through the insulating layer on a transistor's gate, the part that turns it on and off.

The reason for such leakage is that as transistors shrink, the insulatoruntil now, silicon dioxidehas had to slim down, too, in order to maintain its electrical performance. But now it is only a few atomic layers thick. At those dimensions, there's no way to keep charge in the gate from tunneling through the insulator and, as a result, power goes to waste. According to Intel, without a high-k dielectric, chips made just three to five years from now would be throwing off 200 W. But a thicker, leak proof layer of high-k dielectric can do the same job in the transistor as the leaky sliver of silicon dioxide, and it will cut the power dissipation in half while allowing for faster-switching transistors. But even that innovation does no more than buy a few years' time on the semiconductor industry road map. The upshot is that for a typical high-performance microprocessor, there would be half a watt less waste heatand half a watt more to run a tiny fan (or liquid pump). In other words, designers would have to know a great deal about how hot the chips get during certain operations and how fast that heat would flow out of the chip under the influence of the heat sink, the generator, and the fan. Heat specialists, though, still lack the computerized design tools they need to model the problem.