Authors:

Ammar M Mukadam

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About Paper:

Today's semiconductor chips are smaller, faster, and more powerful than ever before. However, this innovation comes at a cost: significant heat generation. Warmer internal temperatures counter this progress by negatively impacting a chip's performance, exponentially increasing power loss, and leading to irreversible damage. Thus, the materials and design of the package surrounding the chip must effectively spread and dissipate the heat generated. This research project characterizes 3D- printed stainless steel samples to understand how different laser-based printing methods affect heat flow. Additionally, we assess the material's thermal performance when incorporated within complex integrated circuit (IC) packages alongside thermal interface materials (TIMs). First, an infrared microscope was used to measure the thermal conductivity of these stainless steel samples. To aid in this characterization, a data visualization GUI was developed to identify which printing procedures most effectively spread heat. We hypothesize that a material's microscopic air gaps and metal grain patterns will be the most significant contributors to its thermal conductivity. Additionally, we tested the samples alongside TIMs, which fill microscopic gaps between layers in the chip package. This involved implementing parallel processing on a Raspberry Pi computing cluster and IC simulations to analyze how workload characteristics affect temperature and TIM degradation. We hypothesize that intensive sequential tasks will lead to thermal hotspots and stress, while highly parallel workloads will have less degradation and overall cooler temperatures. Ultimately, this research showcases how computational tools, including simulation, high-performance computing, and data visualization, can be leveraged to evaluate 3D-printed materials within IC packages. Keywords: Packaging; Semiconductor; Thermal; Heat Transfer † Presenting Undergrad Author; ‡ Contributing Undergrad Author; * Undergrad Acknowledgment

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Ammar M Mukadam