White Paper: Breaking the Thermal–Hydraulic Trade-Off: A Non-Uniform Straight-Microchannel Cold Plate for High-Heat-Flux Cooling

This study proposes a heat-flux-based non-uniform straight-microchannel cold plate design for non-uniform chip heat loading. A preliminary parametric analysis at a fixed open-area ratio of 50% showed that reducing the wall thickness and channel gap below 80/80 μm caused a sharp increase in pressure drop while providing only a limited additional thermal benefit. Therefore, the uniform 80/80 μm straight-microchannel configuration was selected as the baseline. In the proposed five-section design, the high-channel-density configuration is retained near the primary hotspot, while lower channel densities are assigned to regions with lower cooling demand. Compared with the uniform baseline, the five-section design reduces the pressure drop by 29.4% and lowers the maximum case temperature by 0.2 °C, demonstrating that regional channel-density allocation can improve the thermal–hydraulic performance of the cold plate.

Download the whitepaper to explore the full parametric dataset and design framework for regionally allocated microchannel cold plates—and see how tailored channel density eliminates hotspot penalties while cutting pumping power by nearly 30%.