Liquid Metal Based Miniaturized Chip-Cooling Device Driven by Electromagnetic Pump

Abstract

Conventional methods for thermal management of computer chips are approaching their practical application limit for recently emerging high integrity and high power processors. There is a strong demand to develop alternative approaches to accommodate to the trend of increasing industrial need. In this paper, a prototype of the newly proposed liquid metal based chip cooling device using electromagnetic pump as the flow driving force was fabricated and demonstrated. The technical routes to build up the new miniaturized system were illustrated. Being flowing based, completely electricity-controllable, and almost entirely made of metal, the new cooling device has a rather strong heat dissipation capability compared with that of the conventional forced liquid or air cooling approaches. A series of experiments successfully showed that the EM pump designed and fabricated in this paper is very flexible in driving the circulation flow of the liquid gallium, and the cooling device thus built up can significantly reduce the temperature of a simulating heating module. Further, promising strategies to optimize the present device were suggested and discussed. A series of new issues concerning the heat and fluid transport, and electromagnetic field effect of liquid metal in developing the micro/nano scale cooling devices were raised by interpreting the theoretical models established for characterizing the running behaviors of the present system. The liquid metal based cooling device would find exciting applications in the heat dissipation area where extremely high heat flux and very small geometry were seriously requested.