Thermo-hydraulic enhancement of microchannel heat sinks using segmented coaxial-shielded TSVs integrated into sinusoidal-featured pin-fins for 3D IC cooling

As three-dimensional integration density increases, the management of electromagnetic signal integrity, thermal dissipation, and thermo-mechanical stress presents ongoing challenges. Efficient thermal management of high-power-density 3D integrated circuits (3D ICs) requires cooling structures that can enhance heat transfer while limiting hydraulic loss and thermal stress. In this study, two novel segmented coaxial-shielded through-silicon via (TSV) configurations, the flat-ended segmented coaxial-shielded TSV (FS-CTSV) and the rounded-edge segmented coaxial-shielded TSV (RS-CTSV), are proposed to improve signal integrity and subsequently integrated into microchannel heat sinks with sinusoidal-featured pin-fins to enhance thermo-hydraulic performance and thermo-mechanical performance under an elastoplastic constitutive model. The results show that the leaf-shaped pin-fin configuration reduces the maximum chip temperature ( T max ) by 7.04 K while reducing the pressure drop ( Δ P ) by up to 54.34% compared with the square pin-fin baseline over the Reynolds number range of R e = 26 –520, and the proposed configurations maintain Performance Evaluation Criterion ( P E C ) values above 1.0, indicating a favorable balance between heat transfer enhancement and pressure-drop penalty. The RS-CTSV further reduces the maximum von Mises stress in the Cu region ( σ max,Cu ) by 7.52% within the elastic regime compared with the FS-CTSV. In addition, the segmented coaxial-shielded TSVs improve the 20 GHz transmission coefficient ( S 21 ) from −0.114 dB to −0.055 dB and −0.032 dB for the FS-CTSV and RS-CTSV, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed TSV-embedded sinusoidal-featured pin-fin microchannels provide a promising thermal management strategy for 3D ICs while maintaining mechanical and electrical reliability.