On-Chip Cooling Emerges to Take the Heat

Processing-intensive applications ranging from AI chips and hyperscale datacenters to aerospace applications and all those devices being integrated into electric cars are generating boat-loads of heat. As conventional thermal management techniques fail to keep pace up with all that hot air, an MIT spinoff has come up with a new way to cool electronics.

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Micro-convective cooling also is touted as delivering 90 percent of the performance of current cooling technologies since it can be integrated as a heat sink on a silicon substrate without the need for exotic semiconductor materials or complex coding.

The best opportunity to scale the cooling technology appears to be enterprise datacenters that are increasingly powered by graphics processors — often coupled with CPUs — as well as emerging AI chips and ASICs. All are being employed to handle demanding workloads as companies roll out more distributed applications.

Many of those use cases represent a doubling or tripling of power density levels, prompting datacenter operators to look for new ways to dissipate heat generated by racks of servers.

The startup’s approach also reflects expanding research into new ways to cool electronics as heat generation and power dissipation soar. Current thermal management approaches involving remote cooling only work by adding weight and volume to electronic components.