Last week, Brian Bailey published an interview with Professor
Madhavan Swaminathan who is the Director of the Interconnect and
Packaging Center (IPC) at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The topic of
the interview was cooling of 3D IC devices. It’s no secret that
cooling will become an issue when you stack a bunch of hot die
together and bond them. The heat has to go somewhere and the
heat from the middle die has nowhere to go but through the outer
die in the stack. For a lot of designs, that’s not going to
work. The stack will overheat. What’s the solution? Di-Hydrogen
Oxide, aka water. Water cooling is both the answer and the non-
answer. As Bailey asks: “So you are saying water cooling is the
only solution but at the same time it is not viable.”
Swaminathan’s reply: “Exactly. At this point in time, people
have demonstrated, including Georgia Tech, that you can cool the
chips by creating micro-channels, creating hollow TSVs that
serve as a pipe to pump water from the printed circuit board
into these micro channels, a