FSW manufacturing process of cold plates compared to brazing for data center liquid cooling

摘要

Liquid cooling becomes more and more popular in high power server thermal design driven by increasing performance demand of HPC, AI and general computing. The cold plate based liquid cooling takes highest market share among all liquid cooling solutions, including, but not limited to, immersion cooling, two-phase refrigerate cooling in the server system. It’s critical to design and manufacture a reliable cold plate for meeting CPU/GPU thermal and mechanical design requirements which become more and more stringent. There are three main manufacture processes for the cold plate, including O-ring based, brazing and friction stir welding (FSW). The paper introduces detailed manufacture process of latter ones for comparison. A study of pros and cons between these manufacturing processes are also discussed in this paper. Finally, the industrial marketing overview and eco-system enabling will be also introduced in this paper to promote appropriate manufacturing process to meet targeting specific applications.