A three-layer microfluidic cooling device can more efficiently remove heat from small electronic devices.

As electronic devices become increasingly powerful and compact, they are able to generate denser heat fluxes, or in other words, more heat can be generated in a smaller area. These heat fluxes can increase the temperature of the device, damage its underlying components, cause malfunction, and ultimately lead to device failure.

To prevent this, electronics engineers rely on thermal management systems and cooling strategies. A promising strategy for dissipating heat in small electronic devices is known as microfluidic cooling. This technology encourages fluid flow through microscopic channels built into or near integrated circuits, removing heat and lowering temperatures within the device.

Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Micro-Nano Manufacturing Technology, Peking University, recently introduced a new microfluidic cooling approach that can remove heat from devices more effectively and efficiently than many strategies introduced to date. The approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, relies on a newly developed three-layer microfluidic cooling device etched into a silicon substrate.

“The miniaturization of advanced electronics can lead to high heat fluxes, which must be dissipated before they cause device degradation or failure,” Zhihu Wu, Wei Xiao and colleagues wrote in the paper. “Embedded microfluidic cooling has potential value in such systems, but the devices are typically limited to heat fluxes below 2,000 W cm. We report a microfluidic cooling strategy that uses single-phase water as the coolant and can dissipate heat fluxes of up to 3,000 W cm with only 0.9 W cm of pumping power.”

The cooling device developed by Wu, Xiao, and colleagues has a three-layer structure. The first layer consists of a tapered manifold that distributes water across the surface of the chip, ensuring that each microchannel receives the same amount of coolant so that the device is evenly cooled.

The intermediate layer, known as the microjet layer, consists of small nozzles that form microjets (i.e., high-velocity streams of fluid jetted directly onto the surface of the chip) to improve heat transfer within the device by targeting thermal boundaries (i.e., areas where heat accumulates). The third and final layer consists of microchannels, small grooves etched into the silicon, that transport warm coolant away from the integrated chip.

“Our approach is based on a three-layer structure consisting of an upper tapered manifold layer, a central microjet layer, and a lower microchannel layer with serrated sidewalls,” Wu, Xiao and colleagues write. “The structure is etched directly onto the backside of the silicon substrate using standard micro-electromechanical system techniques. Additionally, the coefficient of performance reaches 13,000 and can dissipate a heat flux of 1,000 W cm-2 with a chip temperature rise of up to 65 K.”

Initial tests have shown that the new microfluidic cooling approach proposed by these researchers removes heat significantly more effectively than most previously introduced strategies. Additionally, the team’s three-layer device requires little pumping power (0.9 W/cm2) to cool the chip and can be manufactured at scale using existing manufacturing processes.

In the future, the recent work by Wu, Xiao, and their colleagues could support the development of small electronic devices that are durable, high-performance, and even energy-efficient. Additionally, their proposed cooling system could be quickly refined and further evaluated in tests with a wider range of small electronic devices.

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