Packaging and Thermal Decoupling of an Optical Array using a Thermoelectric Cooler

Today's compact electronic packages consist of chips with different restrictions on their operating temperatures. To ensure reliability in such devices, each component must be kept within their temperature limits. This often results in overcooling the entire package to meet the lowest temperature limit that exists within the system, leading to an inefficient thermal management scheme. By implementing localized cooling, the chips with lower operating temperatures can be thermally de-coupled from the rest of the package, providing a more energy efficient solution. Thermoelectric coolers are favorable candidates for such localized cooling, due to their compact form-factor and solid-state nature. Thus, in this paper, the utilization of a thermoelectric cooler to thermally de-couple an optical array-with a temperature limitation of 85°C-from a larger electronic device-with a temperature limitation of 105°C-is investigated. The system is initially modeled in the commercially available FEM software ANSYS for illustrating the theoretical enhancement of using a thermoelectric cooler. Finally, a test setup of the actual stack-up is built and the thermal de-coupling is experimentally demonstrated using a commercially available thermoelectric cooler.