A Disruptive Innovation of Thermal Management

Whitepaper This Whitepaper Gives Information About: → How to achieve excellent thermal management with restricted space → What becomes possible by applying additive manufacturing to CPU cooling → Why additive manufacturing is key for the further miniaturization of electronic devices → How new design freedom paves the way for radical innovations A Disruptive Innovation By of Thermal Management Dr. Matthias Hoeh Senior Business Development Manager EOS GmbH Reinventing a High-Performance CPU Cooler with Additive Manufacturing High heat loads limit the miniaturiza- superior effectiveness as conventionally tion of portable computers, power manufactured components, but requires electronic devices and high-power much less space. Enlarged surfaces, LED lighting. Most ambitious any-shape geometries and conformal technological solutions from the lab cooling channels are among the are not ready for mass production opportunities of this manufacturing and deployment in consumer technology. products. But industrial 3D printing, The efficiency gains that can be achieved or so-called additive manufacturing, were demonstrated with a gaming CPU can bridge the gap for thermal cooler design for additive manufactu- management components and keep ring. To maintain the same chip lossy electronics cool even when the temperature, the new part requires 81 % available space is severely limited. The less space and 93 % less weight than the freedom of design provided by 3D best-in-class conventional cooler. printed thermal management components offers the same or 2 | 3 Frontpage: CPU cooler in biomimetic design Designer: Moritz Heller The Future of Thermal As a fundamental consequence of non-ideal systems, losses and hence heat cannot be Management for avoided. But they could be reduced in the Electronics future. Innovative technologies that perform Content tasks much more efficiently than before can circumvent the excess heat limitations. For Electronic components are developing in two example, high hopes have been placed in the The Future of Thermal Management for Electronics 3 basic directions: Performance is increasing transition from electronics to photonics. Even The Challenges of Miniaturization: Paper-Thin Laptops 4 and size is decreasing. now, photons rather than electrons are the Small and Light Weight Heat Exchangers Come at High Cost 6 information carriers used by the backbones of Everything revolves around one central modern communication [5]. In the future, Additive Manufacturing Is Ideal for Miniaturized Heat Exchangers 7 problem: heat [1]. This is true at microscopic photonics might also advance into Innovating a High-Performance Gaming CPU Cooler 8 scales, e.g. where noise on a quantum level microprocessors and improve the performance limits how small the structures of processing Comparison with Best-In-Class CPU Cooler 9 per volume of computers [6]. New algorithms for units can become [2,3]. But it also manifests CPU Cooler Size Decreased by 81 % with 3D Printing 11 quantum simulators and one day possibly even at macroscopic scales, where the amount quantum computers can solve certain classes New Design Freedom Paves the Way for Radical Innovations 13 of heat that can be transported away from of problems more efficiently than classical, Sources 14 high-performing components limits the purely binary computers [7]. performance per volume. But these approaches are all decades away from List of Figures being deployed to consumer products. The question at hand is how to radically improve Figure 1 Historical development of the laptop 5 thermal solutions for existing electronic devices Figure 2a Simple air cooler made by extrusion 6 and push the boundaries of miniaturization. A solution would serve a huge market demand. Figure 2b Complex water cooler assembled from sub-components 6 Figure 3 Delicate and complex components 7 Figure 4a Cross section of benchmark CPU cooler 8 → Laptops and mobile phones are becoming Figure 4b Cross section of 3D printed CPU cooler 8 thinner and more powerful. Figure 5a Benchmark CPU cooler with coolant flow simulation in central plane 9 Everything revolves Figure 5b 3D printed CPU cooler with coolant flow simulation in central plane 9 → Communication infrastructure is a data bottleneck and needs to support ever Figure 6a Benchmark CPU cooler with coolant flow velocities in the horizontal plane directly above the CPU 10 around one central higher transfer rates, while at the same Figure 6b 3D printed CPU cooler with coolant flow velocities in horizontal plane directly above the CPU 10 time a landscape of bulky transmission Figure 7a Benchmark CPU cooler with temperatures at CPU surface across the base plates 10 problem: heat! towers must be avoided. Figure 7b 3D Printed CPU cooler with temperatures at CPU surface across the base plates 10 Figure 8 Optimized 3D printed CPU cooler 10 → Electric cars are full of high power Figure 9 Biomimetic heat exchanger design inspired by sea anemones 13 electronics that need to be integrated into a limited space. In each of these markets, new thermal solutions List of Tables need to be developed. Significant technical progress is required within the next few years. Table 1 Comparison of the technical performance between the benchmark CPU cooler and the 3D printed CPU cooler 12 4 | 5 The Challenges of The CPU clock frequency is a readily available measure of performance, and there is plenty Miniaturization: of historical data for computers. The clock frequency has been stagnating since about Paper-Thin Laptops 2004; instead, the number of cores has been growing exponentially [8]. The stagnation To illustrate the miniaturization trend, of the clock frequency has several reasons, the the historical development of portable most prominent being excess heat creation. computers is a good example. Their steady Higher frequencies require higher voltages, increase in performance and decrease in but the excess heat associated with them size has been particularly challenging. cannot be fully compensated by cooling Portable computers have come a long way technology improvements. In a nutshell, the since the 1980s. The miniaturization of limitations in heat transfer restrict the sub-systems and components was a major maximum clock frequency and hence the single- aspect of their hardware development. thread performance of the processor*. We analyzed the situation for laptops as an example of powerful computers with limited available space. To measure the technological 10000 advancement of miniaturization, we normalized the CPU clock frequency with respect to weight. 1000 The resulting historical analysis shows that miniaturization of laptops is slowing down. The data points in figure 1 are randomly picked 100 laptop types with different display sizes from [10] various manufacturers . The chart shows how 10 the exponential CPU clock frequency growth ended in around 2004. 1 CPU clock frequency to laptop weight ratio (MHz/kg) ratio weight laptop to frequency CPU clock 0,1 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 Year of product release Laptops are just one example, but they convincingly illustrate the importance of efficient cooling in small spaces and demonstrate how additively manufactured thermal management components can revitalize the miniaturization of electronic devices. Figure 1: Historical development of the laptop * Multi-thread performance can be increased by performing multiple core processing at lower clock frequencies for each core. The trend of CPU clock frequency relative to weight shows that a limit has been reached for single-core processing. 6 | 7 Small and Light In a housing with extremely limited space for Additive Additive manufacturing thus opens a door to a the heat exchanger, neither of the two new world of thermal management solutions. Weight Heat commonly used types is a good choice. Further Manufacturing Is Ideal Old limitations are obsolete and new ideas can miniaturization of the best-performing coolers flourish. For thermal solutions, the rewards Exchangers Come at would be costly, because it involves further for Miniaturized Heat include increased surface areas, complex shaped High Cost production steps and longer machining times. Exchangers internal channels for optimized coolant flow This represents a restraint on the further and functional integration. Miniaturization and miniaturization of computers and other increased heat transfer performance are the For the study, we focused on CPU coolers The economics of complex parts made with electronic devices. goals. directly mounted on the chip via a heat additive manufacturing by laser sintering spreader. The goal of this study was to break the are exactly the opposite of the economics miniaturization limit and innovate a CPU of subtractive manufacturing (i.e. most If we look at the solutions available today, we cooler that matches the best-in-class conventional manufacturing technologies). notice two main types of CPU coolers. One is products while requiring much less space Roughly speaking, the less material the optimized for manufacturability, the other for and material. By designing for additive laser has to melt, the less machining time performance. The most economical way to mass manufacturing from the start, the typical is required. Delicate and complex parts manufacture chip coolers is by extruding restraints of conventional production are therefore faster and cheaper to produce aluminum, but the performance of products methods were overcome. than massive and simple parts (figure 3). manufactured

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