Cooling Solution for Next Generation High-Power Processor Boards in 1U Computer Servers

Processor powers of 30–60W are becoming very common in electronic industry. With constraints such as available heat sink space and the cost of the thermal solution, heat sink optimization has become one of the major concerns in the final design process. In this work two (new) strategies are proposed along with the traditional heat sink optimization process (i.e. fin/base thickness and fin spacing optimization). First, heat pipes are embedded into the aluminum base extruded heat sink to reduce spreading resistance. The resulting heat sink is more efficient and even cheaper when compared to the bounded-fin technology on a copper base. Second, the angled base modification is introduced to reduce the spreading resistance in the flow direction. It is observed that up to 5 degrees angle in the base can reduce the thermal resistance of an active heat sink by 8–10%.