Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

A high-performance thermal infrared system is urgently needed for the research of near-source/junction microchip cooling, which aims to solve the thermal challenges faced by the semiconductor industry and electronics industry.    For the past several decades, although the world has managed to keep up with the Moore's law, the continuously shrinking dimensions of the semiconductor features have introduced significant obstacles to keeping the historical trends of scaling. Thermal management is one of the key challenges that International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors listed for semiconductors. The challenge must be addressed to ensure that microelectronics would be able to remain a driver for innovation in a wide range of applications.    Tow-phase liquid cooling using dielectric fluids will be applied directly on and in the microchip. This near-source/junction cooling strategy can significantly reduce the total thermal resistance such that the heat can be transferred from the high-number-density small transistors with relatively low operating temperatures. Innovative surface enhancement using composite silicon surfaces composed of super-hydrophobic and super-hydrophilic regions will be applied to enhance the cooling. Essential to this research program is the surface temperature measurement, which is needed for assessing local cooling performance and correlating it with local two-phase flow dynamics and surface characteristics. The temperature measurement must be non-invasive with fast frame rate, high resolution, and high accuracy, which can only be enabled by a high-performance thermal infrared system. The requested infrared system operates at mid-wave infrared and is capable of capturing fast and small temperature changes in micrometer-scale areas on the microchip's surface.    The infrared system will be used by 3 PhD students, 1 master's student, and 10 undergraduate students within the next 5 years to develop 3 cooling schemes for near-source/junction cooling. In long term, we will collaborate with partners in the electronics industry to integrate the developed cooling technologies into the thermal designs of their microprocessors and central processing units, leading to high-performance and highly compact deigns of microelectronics and power electronics. The trained HQP will become highly qualified engineers and technology leaders in liquid cooling, thermal management, and electronic packaging. The project will strengthen Canada's position in global semiconductor market and enhance Canada's competitiveness industries such as computers, AI, data centers, aircraft, radars, satellites, etc.