Experimental and Numerical Study of 3-D Printed Direct Jet Impingement Cooling for High-Power, Large Die Size Applications

In this article, we design, demonstrate, and characterize a 3-D printed package-level polymer jet impingement cooling solution on a 23×23 mm
²
thermal test chip. The experimental hardware results for a nozzle pitch of 2 mm show that, with 1-kW power dissipation, at a coolant (deionized (DI) water) flow rate of 3 liters per minute (LPM), the measured average chip temperature increase is ~65 °C with a cooler pressure drop of 0.15 bar between the inlet and outlet connections. It is also shown that bare die cooling without lid [and thermal interface material (TIM)] shows better cooling performance than the lidded package. Second, an advanced 3-D printed manifold with an additional flow redistribution structure is demonstrated. The experimental results show that the improved design achieves a better chip temperature uniformity compared to the reference design, showing a reduction of the chip temperature gradient with a factor of 4 and 2.3 for a flow rate of 0.5 and 3 LPM, respectively, while no significant impact on the cooler pressure drop was measured. The numerical modeling studies predict an additional 15.4% thermal performance improvement, by reducing the nozzle pitch from 2 to 1 mm, for a flow rate of 3 LPM.