Hot spot cooling using embedded thermoelectric coolers

Abstract

Localized areas of high heat flux on microprocessors produce hot spots that limit their reliability and performance. With increasingly dense circuits and the integration of high power processors with low power memory, non-uniform thermal profiles will become more dramatic and difficult to manage. Chip scale thermal solutions designed to keep hot spots below a critical temperature unnecessarily overcool the rest of the CPU and add to heat-sink load. Localized hot spot cooling solutions, even active systems that contribute some additional heat, can do a better job controlling hot spot temperatures when efficiently integrated with a heat spreader. Embedded thermoelectric cooling (eTEC) is a promising approach to reduce the temperature of highly localized, high heat flux hot spots generated by today's advanced processors