RESUMO
The trends toward higher power, higher frequency, and smaller scale electronics are making heat dissipation ever more challenging. Passive thermal management based on high thermal conductivity materials or through-silicon vias (TSVs) may not provide sufficient cooling for hot spots reaching 1 kW cm-2, and active thermal management by thermoelectric cooling (TEC) may require large power consumption or suffer from a large off-state thermal resistance of thermoelectric materials. Here we address these issues by integrating a holey silicon-based TEC with a TSV that directly draws heat from a hot spot to combine active and passive cooling approaches. Our simulations of the TSV-integrated TEC demonstrate exceptional cooling performance, which reduces the hot spot temperature from 154 °C to 68 °C while dissipating a heat flux of 1 k W cm-2 and consuming 0.5 W for TEC operation. The off-state hot spot temperature, 154 °C, is 24 °C lower than that of the same TEC with no TSV, and the on-state hot spot temperature, 68 °C, is 67 °C lower than that of the same TEC with no TSV. We also investigate the cooling prospects of metal-filled holey silicon by modeling the electron-phonon coupling and size dependent transport phenomena, which can further increase the thermal conductivity anisotropy and improve the TEC performance depending on the metal-to-silicon interfacial resistance. These results show the combined passive and active cooling in TSV-integrated TEC offers effective hot spot thermal management solutions for advanced electronics.
