Efficient Heat Dissipation for Active Optical Components on Printed Circuit Boards
Background As chips become more complex, interconnects need to be placed more densely on printed circuit boards to carry data in and out of these chips. Copper interconnects, in widespread use today, are quickly approaching their physical limits because of heat and crosstalk problems, thereby threatening to create a bottleneck in system design.These problems can be eliminated with optical interconnects. However, the devices that convert electrical signals on the chip to optical signals for transmission on the interconnect, and re-convert the optical signals to electrical signals at the receiving end, also generate a substantial amount of heat, due to the very high operating speeds of current-day digital electronics. In order for optical interconnects to gain widespread acceptance, a solution must be found to dissipate the heat produced by the devices that generate and process the optical signals.
Invention Description The invention is an efficient heat dissipation mechanism that involves electroplating each active optical device with a heat-conducting material (e.g., copper), and then connecting all electroplated devices to any surface of the printed circuit board exposed to the air. This mechanism eliminates the heating problem.
Benefits
Film is deposited in a process commonly used to fabricate thick copper electrical trace No additional fabrication steps are required (simple and reliable fabrication process)
Manufacturing costs are reduced due to simplified assembly Provides an effective heat management scheme
Features
Can be applied to optical interconnect devices and embedded devices in PCB so that both high clock rate processors and memory modules are interconnected Provides many applicable inventive concepts that can be embodied in a wide variety of specific contexts Provides an efficient optoelectric signal communications system, overcoming process incompatibilities previously associated with implementing optical components in high performance electronic systems.
Market Potential/Applications Printed circuit boards that contain chips transferring large (hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes or higher) amounts of data between each other at high frequency (e.g., multi-processor high-end servers used in corporate data centers).
IP Status Two U.S. patent application filed
UT Researcher Ray T. Chen, Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin Chul-Chae Choi, Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin
Type of Offer: Licensing
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