Thermal Spreading Resistance in Flux Channel With Arbitrary Heat Convection in the Sink Plane

Thermal spreading resistance is one of the key factors for designing the thermal management systems in microelectronic devices. This type of thermal resistance occurs in most of the microelectronic devices and causes some difficulties for thermal engineers to model the system. One of the common geometries in these devices is the flux channel. Different boundary conditions can be applied on the flux channel based on the designing criteria of the system including the arbitrary distribution of heat sinks over the sink plane. This boundary condition is usually simplified as a constant heat transfer coefficient to facilitate the modeling of the system. In this paper, a flux channel with an arbitrary distributed heat transfer coefficient over the sink plane is studied without simplification of the sink boundary condition. Both adiabatic and convective cooling over the edges of the flux channel are considered. Due to the complexity of the sink boundary condition, the conventional analytical solutions are not applicable and the method of least squares is used. By employing this approach, the effect of a non-uniform heat transfer coefficient on thermal spreading resistance is investigated. The solution is presented in form of a Fourier series expansion which can be used to obtain the temperature all over the channel. Results are validated with Finite Element Models, FEM. This approach is useful for thermal engineers who have some difficulty for modeling complex boundary conditions and presents an effective solution for thermal resistance in the flux channels.