Integrated microfluidic power generation and cooling for bright silicon MPSoCs

Abstract

Abstract-The soaring demand for computing power in our digital information age has produced, as an undesirable sideeffect, a surge in power consumption and heat density for Multiprocessors Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). The resulting temperature rise results in operating conditions that already preclude operating all the cores at maximum performance levels, in order to prevent system overheating and failures. With more power demands, MPSoCs will face a power delivery wall due to the reliability limitations of the underlying power delivery medium. Thus, state-of-the-art power and cooling delivery solutions are reaching their performance limits and it will no longer be possible to power up simultaneously all the available on-chip cores (situation known as dark silicon). In this paper we investigate a recently proposed disruptive approach to overcome the prevailing worst-case power and cooling provisioning paradigms for MPSoCs. This proposed approach integrates MPSoC with an on-chip microfluidic fuel cell network for joint cooling and power supply (i.e., localized power generation and delivery). By providing alternative means to power delivery integrated with cooling, MPSoCs are expected to gain in I/O connectivity. Based on this disruptive technology, we can envision the removal of the current limits of power delivery and heat dissipation in MPSoC designs, subsequently avoiding dark silicon and enabling a paradigm shift in future energy-proportional computing architecture designs.

3D Integrated Circuit Cooling with Microfluidics

“…Mohamed M. Sabry et al demonstrated the potential of power delivery and cooling issues, caused by limitations in Dennard scaling, using a disruptive approach for integrated power generation and cooling based on multiprocessor SoCs. Indeed, this new approach used the coolant fluid as a means of delivering energy to the chips [ 46 ]. Wen Yueh et al presented the design, experimental characterization, and feasibility analysis of integrated in-package fluidic cooling for mobile SoCs.…”

Towards Deeply Scaled 3D MPSoCs with Integrated Flow Cell Array Technology

“…Flow Cell Array (FCA) technology, first introduced in [8], is a microfluidic channel-based solution for thermal and power management of 3D ICs, combining power generation and on-chip liquid cooling. It has emerged as a promising approach to solve heat dissipation and power delivery problems of 3D integration [9]. FCAs are able to transform absorbed heat into additional power, as electrochemical reactions between electrolytes inside the channels are accelerated with temperature [10].…”