An Assessment of Direct Chip Cooling Enhancement Using Pin Fins

The use of pin fins to provide direct cooling of computer chip mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB) is studied experimentally. This concept is targeted toward improving the thermal design for the increasingly popular compact personal computer options such as the laptop notebook and web book, in which the use of a conventional heat sink might not be feasible or desirable due to the lack of space, as well as the light weight requirement. Experimental data show that the installation of a pin fin between a chip and the PCB can provide significant direct heat transfer enhancement. Data for pin heights of 4 mm, 7 mm, and 10 mm are presented. Results show that for typical chip size and power, pin fins can lead to an order of magnitude increase in the heat transfer coefficient compared to the flat plate forced convection results. While the existing heat transfer and pressure drop correlations yield good qualitative agreement with the data, the correlation tends to underpredict the heat transfer coefficient obtained in the present work.