Yue Zhang won the Outstanding Interactive Presentation Award at the 62nd IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, held May 29-June 1, 2012 in San Diego, Calif.

A Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Ms. Zhang was recognized for her paper entitled "3D Stacked Microfluidic Cooling for High Performance 3D ICs," which she coauthored with her fellow Ph.D. student Ashish Dembla; her Ph.D. advisor Muhannad Bakir, an associate professor in ECE; and Yogendra Joshi, a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Cooling is a significant challenge for high-performance, high-power 3D ICs. In her paper, Ms. Zhang and her colleagues describe the experimental evaluation of 3D ICs with embedded microfluidic cooling. For the first time, different architectures were experimentally evaluated including: 1) a memory-on-processor stack, 2) a processor-on-processor stack with equal power dissipation, and 3) a processor-on-processor stack with different power dissipation. In all cases, embedded microfluidic cooling shows significant junction temperature reduction compared to air-cooling.