IBM Chilling Chip Stacks with Fluid in Microchannels

EETimes has a very interesting story about work at IBM, along with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH).  They're using fluids (including, perhaps, water) passing through 50 µm diameter microchannels to cool stacked die.

This sounds similar to the excellent work that has been going on for several years at Georgia Tech.  Dr. Deepak Sekar gave a presentation on the research at the recent IEEE SCV EDS 3D Interconnect Symposium.  And Georgia Tech has a nice picture:

These developments are exciting because they represent an approach, albeit a fairly complicated one, to address the thermal management challenges presented by stacked die architectures.  I'm not sure whether this methodology will ever turn out to be cost effective for mainstream systems, and it will most likely never be the answer for mobile devices.  However, it's certainly viable for high end fixed location applications.  For the others, we'll probably have to focus more on reducing power and leakage.

I was also interested to note that the IBM work is targeting connection densities up to 10K connections per mm².

It's comforting to see that the big guns, like these organizations, are actively pursuing solutions to the real challenges of vertical integration.

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