Characterization and Analysis of Low Profile Plate-Fin Heat Sinks for Advanced Thermal Packaging of Consumer Electronics

Abstract

Thermal performance in conjunction with fluid dynamic characterization and analysis on low profile heat sink was carried out. Regardless to the increasing power of VLSI chip, recent advanced packaging for compact and slim enclosure for consumer electronics requires a low profile heat sink with a small space available for cooling fan that limits the power of pumping airflow. Therefore, highly integrated fins for low profile heat sink become important to be characterized and modeled. Such low profile and high fin density heat sink has non-ideal shape for shrouding that has not been modeled yet. Proposed semi-bypass model particularly for the practical application of such heat sink is discussed with experimental results and numerical analysis. The apparatus is designed to measure both thermal and fluid dynamic characteristics at the same time. The results are compared based on tested range and found in good agreement at near optimum design. With utilizing this analytic model, cooling performance is optimized with fin number for given pumping power. To understand the shroud impact, these heat sinks are compared with similar foot print and conventional open fin heat sinks which have been already characterized. In addition, semi-bypass impact is also compared with ideally full shroud case in the model. Interestingly, this semi-bypass design is found slightly better than full shroud heat sinks in terms of the performance for same given pumping power.