Professor Tiwei Wei presented a technical seminar, “Advanced Thermal Management of 3D Semiconductor Chips and Packages: From External Cooling to High-Performance Thermal Materials Within the Package,” as part of the CA DREAMS Technical Seminar Series at the USC Information Sciences Institute.
As semiconductor systems continue to evolve toward high-density 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration, increasing power density and heat flux create major challenges for system performance and reliability. Future 3D systems can experience heat fluxes approaching 500–1000 W/cm², together with localized hotspots, thermal crosstalk, and thermo-mechanical stresses.
In the seminar, Prof. Wei presented an exterior-to-core thermal management framework that addresses thermal transport across multiple length scales, from devices and interconnects to chips and package-level architectures.
The presentation highlighted recent research from the UCLA Nano-PACK Lab on:
- Direct-on-chip microfluidic cooling, including single-phase and two-phase cooling approaches
- Near-junction thermal management for high-power semiconductor devices
- Package-level microfluidic cooling architectures for heterogeneous integration
- Advanced thermal packaging materials for high-performance heat spreading
- Thermal materials and architectures designed for extreme thermal isolation and localized thermal control
The talk emphasized the need to move beyond conventional external cooling and develop thermal-management technologies that are integrated directly into advanced semiconductor packages. By combining cooling architectures, thermal materials, and multiscale thermal modeling, the research aims to address the increasingly complex thermal challenges of next-generation 3D semiconductor systems.
The seminar was hosted by the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and was open to the broader research community.
Watch the full seminar:
YouTube — Advanced Thermal Management of 3D Semiconductor Chips and Packages
Event information:
USC Information Sciences Institute — CA DREAMS Technical Seminar