Hanju Oh and his colleagues have been named the winners of the 2016 Best Oral Session Paper Award at the 66th IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), held May 31-June 3, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Oh will be presented with this award at the 2017 IEEE ECTC, which will take place May 30-June 2 in Orlando, Florida.

The title of the award-winning paper is “High-frequency analysis of embedded microfluidic cooling within 3-D ICs using a TSV testbed," which Oh coauthored with his fellow Ph.D. student Xuchen Zhang; his co-advisor, ECE Professor and College of Engineering Dean Gary May; and his advisor, ECE Professor Muhannad S. Bakir.

In this paper, Oh and his colleagues present, for the first time, the measurements and analysis of copper through-silicon vias (TSVs) within microfluidics for applications in three-dimensional (3-D) silicon microsystem cooling. The fabrication and process integration of TSVs within a silicon microfluidic heat sink (based on a micropin-fin heat sink architecture) is first presented. 

Next, the frequency-response of the micropin-fin heat sink embedded TSVs within deionized water is experimentally analyzed. It is shown that such TSVs exhibit higher insertion loss, capacitance, and conductance than conventional TSVs due to the intrinsic electrical properties of deionized water. Moreover, the paper presents coaxially shielded TSVs embedded in a micropin-fin heat sink and demonstrates the electrical isolation of the signal TSV from the surrounding deionized-water.