From Air to Liquid: Cooling Methods in Data Center Network Switch Technology

The rapid growth of cloud computing, streaming services, IoT devices, and AI workloads has led to a significant rise in global network traffic. Network switches, essential for connecting devices like computers and servers, have evolved to handle this surge, with data transfer rates increasing from 100GbE to 800GbE in under a decade. High-performance network processing units now consume close to 800W, highlighting the growing power demands and cooling challenges. Optical modules, such as Octal Small Form Factor Pluggable (OSFP) and Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD), have become crucial for performance and consume high power. This increase in power consumption and density has created significant thermal management challenges. This paper explores thermal management in network switches, including air-cooling and liquid cooling solutions. It also examines the impact of next generation network switching technologies on thermal design and discusses emerging liquid cooling technologies and two-phase cooling methods for switch chips and optical subassemblies.