Integrated thermal-fluidic I/O interconnects for an on-chip microchannel heat sink

Power dissipation in microprocessors will reach a level that necessitates chip-level liquid cooling in the near future. An on-chip microfluidic heat sink can reduce the thermal interfaces between an IC chip and the convective cooling medium. Through wafer-level processing, integrated thermal-fluidic I/O interconnects enable on-chip microfluidic heat sinks with ultrasmall form factor at low-cost. This letter describes wafer-level integration of microchannels at the wafer back-side with through-wafer fluidic paths and thermal-fluidic input/output interconnection for future generation gigascale integrated chips.