Liquid Cooling Distribution

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CSIRO and ASTRON have developed the Gemini board for the SKA-Low correlator and beamformer. The heart of the board is a Xilinx FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) which will burn over 100 Watts of power. Liquid cooling will be used to cool down the board and its components. Twelve Gemini boards will be integrated in a subrack (mechanical housing). At the backside of the subrack a backplane will be installed to connect the Gemini boards.

One of the challenges to overcome was the distribution of coolant to the twelve boards. For that the mechanical group has designed a manifold which is placed at the backside and takes care of the liquid distribution to all of the boards. The boards can be ejected and plugged in, while the liquid remains flowing. The successful test of this action without any liquid spill was a good reason to eat cake and celebrate the completion of the design.

On the picture Hiddo is showing proudly the next achievement: distribution of the liquid to the FPGA and other components on the board. As you can see, the design is ready on paper. Next the design will be produced by Sjouke of the mechanical group and tested together with Gijs from the DESP group (Digital and Embedded Signal Processing).