This study concerns cooling of electronic components of intense background heat flux with one ultra intense hot spot (e.g. 1000 Wcm−2 on a footprint of 1 cm × 1 cm with 5000 Wcm−2 applied to a 0.02 cm × 0.02 cm region at the center). To manage these extreme heat fluxes and consequently surpass the thermal-hydrodynamic challenges and design paradigms, for example as specified in a recent DARPA request for proposals (Intrachip/Interchip Enhanced Cooling Fundamentals - ICECool Fundamentals [1]), on-chip two-phase multi-microchannel cooling integrated with a superlattice (SL) thin-film thermoeletric cooling (TEC) technology was investigated via computer simulations.
The simulations showed that increasing TEC electrical current results in greater enhancement of heat flow through the TEC, but at high currents this benefit is offset by a net addition of heat to the system, which must also be evacuated by the microchannels. When optimized, a minimum peak junction temperature of about 86 °C for a current of about 8 A was found, which represented a reduction of about 4 °C from a maximum allowed 90 °C at the ultra-intense hot-spot, thus potentially significantly capable of exceeding the DARPA [1] requirement, due to the embedded SL TEC within the microevaporator (ME) structure.