Multi-physics simulation of microprocessor package under water cooling

Simulation tools today are well developed and make it possible to study more than one physical phenomena in the engineering processes. In this paper a multi-physics simulation was performed to investigate the thermal, hydraulic and stress behaviour of a flip-chip microprocessor package and a water-cooling thermal system. The distribution of the temperature, velocity, pressures, and stress inside the integrated circuit (IC) package and the water jacket was predicted and analyzed. The thermal resistance, Rjw, was defined and calculated to evaluate the overall thermal performance. The difference between the numerically predicted Rjw and the experimental result is within 10%. Thermal and hydraulic parametric studies were performed on the parameters such as the water flow rate, the die size, the channel height, and the base thickness of the water jacket. The impact of heater was also investigated to optimize the heater efficiency under different thermal contact between the IC package and the thermal head. Stress simulation was performed on the heater plate and the IC package subject to the temperature profile. The thermal stress and deformation were found to be at safe level under the given conditions. The results show that the use of multi-physics simulation and analysis can provide a deeper insight of complex processes, as well as to investigate the key parameters for system optimization. The numerical approach can reduce the risk and uncertainties at design stage as well as improve the system performance at the production stage.