Quiet Passive Cooling of High Performance Microsystems with Additional Temperature Sensor

A. Samake, P. Kocanda, A. Kos (AGH Univ. of Science and Techn., Poland)

This paper attempts to investigate the feasibility of chip’s operating frequency/supply voltage using data about cooling efficiency. It focuses in the introduction of the concept of time shift (TS). TS is the interval of time in which the chip works in higher frequency without any thermal safety violation while its temperature is close to critical thermal threshold (when the cooling efficiency is increasing). The computations of TS values versus different physical conditions of heat sinks were done using RC thermal compact model in Spice environment. Therefore, the authors compare TS values for electronic systems (chip fixed at heat sink) whose heat sinks made of different materials (aluminum and copper) with same geometry. As a result, TS can last till to hundreds of seconds thus it may fulfill a significant part of chip total working time. Based on this assumption, the proposed approach might be a way for increasing the average clock frequency/voltage supply, to improve the die throughput as well as to fully use the thermal ability of a chip fixed to cooling system.