Three Alibaba Cloud Papers Selected for DesignCon 2022 on Immersion Cooling and High‑Speed Interconnects

DesignCon 2022, the premier conference for high‑speed signal processing and semiconductor design, was held in Santa Clara, California, featuring over 150 technical papers across 13 fields. Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure server R&D team had three papers accepted, demonstrating the feasibility of its immersion‑cooling technology for large‑scale deployment.

Paper 1 – 112G‑PAM4‑QSFP Interconnect: A Study in Air Cooling and Immersion Cooling – The study evaluates the performance of 112 Gbps PAM4 links in immersion‑cooled environments, comparing them with traditional air‑cooled designs. Results show that PAM4 links are highly noise‑sensitive and that directly porting air‑cooled designs to immersion cooling can degrade impedance continuity, potentially falling short of IEEE 800G Ethernet specifications.

Paper 2 – PCB Manufacturing Design Guidelines for Cost Reduction in Immersion Cooling – This work proposes PCB design practices tailored to mild immersion‑cooling conditions, aiming to reduce total cost of ownership while maintaining high performance. The guidelines address the elimination of humidity, vibration, and dust, and report a >50% reduction in average hardware failure rates under immersion cooling.

Paper 3 – Risks and Enablers of Server Platform Design in Immersion Cooling – The paper investigates signal‑integrity challenges for DDR4/DDR5 and high‑speed PCIe Gen5 interfaces in liquid‑cooled environments, offering mitigation methods for eye‑diagram margin degradation caused by changes in the cooling medium.

Overall, Alibaba Cloud’s immersion‑cooling strategy is positioned as a key technology for future high‑density, energy‑efficient data centers, aligning with ESG goals and supporting the growing demand for compute power while reducing carbon emissions.