Three-Dimensional Electro-Thermal Modeling of Thin Film Micro- Refrigerators for Site-Specific Cooling of VLSI ICs

Non-uniform high temperature distribution has become a primary concern in view of VLSI performance and reliability. This problem becomes much severer in the nanometer-scale technologies as the required operating frequency moves into the multi-giga Hertz range. Effective handling of “hot spots” is an important issue. Recently, a cooling technology based on heterostructure integrated thermionic (HIT) micro-refrigerator has been proposed as one of possible on-chip thermal management solutions. Since high temperature can severely impact VLSI performance and reliability, it is important to obtain on-chip temperature profiles of VLSI chips together with microrefrigerators attached. This paper, for the first time, presents a detailed three-dimensional modeling and FDM analysis of single thin film micro-refrigerator integrated onto a chip. The model takes into account of the Peltier cooling and heating, Joule heating, and heat conduction. The new model has been validated by verifying the maximum cooling and device’s power consumption with experimental data and ANSYS simulation results.