%0 Conference Paper %K Cooling %K Thin films %K Superlattices %K Heat flux %A Ihtesham Chowdhury %A Ravi S Prasher %A Kelly Lofgreen %A Sridhar Narasimhan %A Ravi Mahajan %A David Koester %A Rama Venkatasubramanian %B ASME 2009 InterPACK Conference collocated with the ASME 2009 Summer Heat Transfer Conference and the ASME 2009 3rd International Conference on Energy Sustainability %D 2009 %G eng %I American Society of Mechanical Engineers %P 521–526 %R 10.1115/InterPACK2009-89268 %T Site-Specific and On-Demand High Heat-Flux Cooling Using Superlattice Based Thin-Film Thermoelectrics %8 07/2009 %X

We have recently reported the first ever demonstration of active cooling of hot-spots of >1 kW/cm2 in a packaged electronic chip using thin-film superlattice thermoelectric cooler (TEC) cooling technology [1]. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of both experimental and theoretical aspects of this technological demonstration and progress. We have achieved cooling of as much as 15°C at a location on the chip where the heat-flux is as high as ∼1300 W/cm2 , with the help of a thin-film TEC integrated into the package. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of high heat-flux cooling with a thin-film thermoelectric device made from superlattices when it is fully integrated into a usable electronic package. Our results, which validate the concept of site-specific micro-scale cooling of electronics in general, will have significant potential for thermal management of future generations of microprocessors. Similar active thermal management could also be relevant for high-performance solid-state lasers and power electronic chips.