Micro-Pump New Cooling For Future Computer Chips
Winga
MrSouth Africa Icrontian
Engineers at Purdue University have developed a tiny "micro-pump" cooling device small enough to fit on a computer chip that circulates coolant through channels etched into the chip.
A decade from now chips will most likely contain upwards of 100 times more transistors and other devices. They will generate far more heat than chips currently in use. The new device has been integrated onto a silicon chip roughly one-sixth of a square inch.
The prototype chip contains numerous water-filled micro-channels, grooves about the width of a human hair. The channels are covered with a series of hundreds of electrodes, electronic devices that receive varying voltage pulses in such a way that a traveling electric field is created in each channel. This creates ions, or electrically charged atoms and molecules, which are dragged along by the moving field causing the water to flow and inducing a cooling action.
A decade from now chips will most likely contain upwards of 100 times more transistors and other devices. They will generate far more heat than chips currently in use. The new device has been integrated onto a silicon chip roughly one-sixth of a square inch.
The prototype chip contains numerous water-filled micro-channels, grooves about the width of a human hair. The channels are covered with a series of hundreds of electrodes, electronic devices that receive varying voltage pulses in such a way that a traveling electric field is created in each channel. This creates ions, or electrically charged atoms and molecules, which are dragged along by the moving field causing the water to flow and inducing a cooling action.
Source: Purdue University"Engineers have been using electrohydrodynamics to move fluids with electric fields for a long time, but it's unusual to be able to do this on the micro-scale as we have demonstrated," Garimella said.
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but there are much better choices for fluids, I'm sure.