Conventional chip-cooling methods use finned metal plates called heat sinks, which are attached to computer chips to dissipate heat. Such attachment methods do not remove heat efficiently enough for an emerging class of high-performance electronics, however, so researchers have developed a new type of cooling system that circulates a liquid coolant directly into electronic chips through an intricate series of tiny microchannels.



“You can pack only so much computing power into a single chip, so stacking chips on top of each other is one way of increasing performance,” said Justin A. Weibel, a research associate professor and co-investigator on the project. “This presents a cooling challenge because if you have layers of many chips, normally each one of these would have its own system attached on top of it to draw out heat. As soon as you have even two chips stacked on top of each other, the bottom one has to operate with significantly less power because it can’t be cooled directly.” The solution is to create a cooling system that is embedded within the stack of chips.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Purdue Develops “Intrachip” Micro-Cooling System