A Novel Cost Efficient Cold Plate Liquid Cooling Solution for Data Center Deployment

• Published in: 2023 22nd IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm) pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: Wu, Zhenghui, He, Yongzhan, Zheng, Jianwu, Cheng, Bing, Zhang, Jun, Lv, Wenqing, Wu, Min, He, Ying, Yue, Pengfei, Ahuja, Nishi, Qiao, Qing
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 30.05.2023
• Subjects: 3DVC (3D vapor chamber); Aluminum; aluminum alloy; Cold plates; Copper; Costs; Data centers; heat sink; Liquid cooling; liquid cooling cold plate; Thermal resistance
• ISSN: 2694-2135
• DOI: 10.1109/ITherm55368.2023.10177506

CPU performance and power are rising rapidly along with the growth of Cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. CPU Thermal Design Power is climbing more than 300W to support the performance requirements. The traditional air-cooling design is meeting the thermal capacity ceiling and liquid cooling cold plate emerges as a novel solution for the high performance computing system. However, the legacy cold plate designs are based on copper material which is heavy weight and not cost effective. In this paper, a novel aluminum liquid cooling cold plate solution is introduced, which has 40% cost down and 70% weight reduction and comparable thermal performance to copper based liquid cooling cold plates. As data center is one of the major energy consumers, it is important to improve energy efficiency and promote low-carbon and sustainable development in data center. Detail innovative aluminum liquid cold plate structure and thermal performance test data are included in the paper based on hundreds of data center aluminum liquid cold plate systems deployment experience.