Modeling and Optimization of Chip Cooling with Two-Phase Vapor Chambers

Ultra-high power densities that are expected in future processors cannot be efficiently mitigated by conventional cooling solutions. Using two-phase vapor chambers (VCs) with micropillar wick evaporators is an emerging cooling technique that can effectively remove high heat fluxes through the evaporation process of a coolant. Two-phase VCs with micropillar wicks offer high cooling efficiency by leveraging a capillary-driven flow, where the coolant is passively driven by the wicking structure that eliminates the need for an external pump. Thermal models for such emerging cooling technologies are essential to evaluate their impact on future processors. Existing thermal models for two-phase VCs use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modules, which incur long design and simulation times. This paper presents a fast and accurate compact thermal model for two-phase VCs with micropillar wicks. Our model achieves a maximum error of 1.25 degrees C with a speedup of 214x in comparison to a CFD model. Using our proposed thermal model, we build an optimization flow that selects the best cooling solution and its cooling parameters to minimize the cooling power under a temperature constraint for a given processor and power profile. We then demonstrate our optimization flow on different chip sizes and hot spot distributions to choose the optimal cooling technique among VCs, microchannel-based two-phase cooling, liquid cooling via microchannels, and a hybrid cooling technique with thermoelectric coolers and liquid cooling with microchannels.