Representative image — customer parts covered by NDA
Customer background
A data center equipment manufacturer needed high-performance liquid cooling heat sinks for server applications. As rack power densities climbed, their air-cooled design had hit its thermal ceiling — the new design used liquid-carrying internal channels to pull heat directly off the processors.
The challenge
The thermal engineers' channel design was aggressive: narrow, deep, serpentine passages that no single machining setup could produce. The assembly had to be absolutely leak-proof — a single failure inside a server rack is catastrophic — and flatness on the die-contact surface had to be held tightly for thermal interface performance. Cost mattered too: these were production parts, not showpieces.
Our solution
We split each heat sink into machined sections designed so every channel surface became accessible to standard tooling — a joint decision made with the customer's engineers during DFM review. The sections were CNC machined from aluminum with the channel geometry milled open-face, then joined by vacuum brazing into a monolithic, leak-proof assembly.
After brazing, sealing faces and mounting features were finish-machined to final flatness, ensuring the thermal contact surface was unaffected by any brazing distortion. Every unit — not a sample — passed pressure decay testing before shipment, and flatness was verified by CMM. More on this capability family on our liquid cooling parts page.
Project specifications
| Material | Aluminum alloy, vacuum-brazed assembly |
| Process | Multi-piece CNC machining + vacuum brazing + finish machining |
| Testing | 100% pressure decay leak test |
| Critical spec | Flatness on die-contact surface, leak-proof channels |
| Application | Server / data center liquid cooling |
| Industry | Electronics · Liquid cooling |
Results
The machined-and-brazed channel design delivered 30% better cooling performance than the customer's previous air-cooled generation, and across two years of volume production not a single unit has failed a leak test in the field. The partnership now covers cold plates and cooling manifolds across several server platforms.
