Coldplate Design for Optimal Thermal Performance of High-Speed Electronics

Thermal management of high-speed electronics has become more challenging due to dramatic increase of power density in high-speed CPUs and GPUs and server size limitations in data center for next generation exascale high-performance computing. Water cooling has been shown to provide better cooling performance compared to air cooling; thus, systematic investigation of water cooling in coldplate designs have been increasingly demanding. Integration of such thermal cooling designs into system level thermal management also creates some issues in general due to the limitations of both hydrodynamics and system level component's arrangements in the servers. For instance, electrical routing and interconnect architecture in electronic packaging create challenges for thermal design of high-end servers. In this paper, we investigate the optimal thermal performance of coldplate design by analyzing the internal thermal resistance and the pressure drop within the coldplate that can optimally be designed for high-end server design. We also show the importance of modeling the barb and riser assembly used in coldplate design to fully understand the flow characterization in the coldplate in which turbulent and vortex flow affects the pressure drop significantly in overall hydrodynamic characterization of the coldplate.