Thermal Analysis of Ball Grid Array Non-Volatile Memory Express Solid-State Drive in Vacuum

Abstract

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been widely used in data storage for micro satellites, data centers, and mobile products due to their high performance and high reliability. Recently, Samsung Electronics starts to introduce a ball grid array (BGA) non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD, which is a combined package of controller and memory units (i.e., DRAM and NAND) into one package. Due to the smaller form factor with high storage densities and multi-functional devices of BGA NVMe SSDs, a thermal issue becomes more important, requiring fundamental understanding of heat dissipation mechanism. Moreover, for applications in micro satellites, thermal analysis of SSDs should be conducted in vacuum environment. Here, we investigate the heat dissipation mechanism in the newly developed BGA NVMe SSD in both the atmosphere and high-vacuum conditions. A finite-element-method-based numerical model is developed for the heat transfer analysis and is verified by experiments at various workload conditions.