Thermal management of high power memory module

Abstract

In the semiconductor industry, the memory device has not been considered as a high power consuming product. However, the increase in the market requirements for high speed and high density has resulted in memory devices that consume more power.Especially, a memory module accommodated with many high speed memory devices can reach to very high levels of power consumption, which in turn, can reach to very high junction temperatures. Therefore, the devices can not be operated properly without thermal management. Hence, in this paper, we are looking for a way to manage the heat generated in a high power memory module. To achieve this goal, a plate fin type heat sink based on air cooling was adopted with consideration of constraints related to the implementation of its thermal solutions. Then, the cooling capability of the memory module was estimated by a parametric study. The parametric study shows that a 20mm module pitch is necessary to dissipate the amount of heat that is targeted in this paper, which is 30W. With the 20mm module pitch, an optimized heat sink configuration was designed by simulation and the cooling performance of the designed heat sink was validated by experiments. For the experiment, test modules were assembled and the junction temperatures of memory devices mounted on modules was measured on a test board. The results showed that simulated and measured data well correlate with each other within acceptable ranges. The maximum cooling capability of the designed heat sink is 37.1W with a 20mm module pitch.