Thermal Mechanical Design and Validation of Memory Heat Spreaders

The design and validation of heat spreaders for server platform memory modules incorporates many challenges that are not present in typical CPU thermal solutions. While the total design power of the CPU has been relatively constant over the last few server generations, the power requirements for memory modules has continued to increase to the point where custom thermal solutions are now required. This paper will describe some of the design and validation challenges that were developed to ensure that memory modules would be sufficiently cooled in order to meet their performance targets.