High Resolution Thermal Design Tools for Air-Cooled Electronics Components and Systems

Abstract

The packaging trends for the latter part of the 1990’s appear to suggest that advanced computing and military application multi-chip modules (MCMs) will generate tremendous heat loads. Advanced, accurate design tools will be needed to evaluate new cooling concepts entailing complex geometries and complex physics, and which are capable of solving large scale numerical problems. This paper presents a high resolution computational model for thermal design of high density electronic packages. Details of numerical model for strongly implicit conjugate heat transfer are discussed. A novel high accuracy numerical wall scheme has been presented to resolve near wall shear stresses and wall heat fluxes. Three electronics cooling problems have been selected to validate the computer code on complex geometry configurations. These configurations are: an SMT module with fully resolved leadframe, 256 pin heat sink and a 20 module MCM with 74 fin heat sink. Results of the computational study are compared with available experimental data. In all three cases very good agreement with experiment has been achieved.