Conventional cooling schemes that rely on rigid heat-sink-to-die coupling in vertical stacks fail to track the dynamic, non-uniform heat map of high-performance artificial-intelligence (AI) chips employing chiplet-based heterogeneous integration, giving rise to local hot spots. To eliminate this mismatch, we present a leaf-vein-inspired fractal microchannel tailored for such AI processors. Its hierarchical bifurcation–confluence topology adaptively reshapes the flow field, delivering ultra-low thermal resistance, high heat-transfer coefficients, and uniform dissipation. Coupled with reconfigurable chiplet placement, the design is evaluated through FEM-based orthogonal experiments that rank the influence of coolant, channel diameter/depth, inlet/outlet position, substrate thickness, and flow rate via range analysis and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). A machine-learned surrogate model of junction temperature is then fed to Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for multi-parameter optimization. When re-simulated with the optimal parameter set, the symmetric fractal network lowered the AI chip junction temperature from 127.80 °C to 30.97 °C, a 76% improvement, offering a theoretical basis for hotspot mitigation in advanced heterogeneous AI packages.
Wu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.