Nano-fridge for microchips.

How can PC processors best cool? With huge fins in a steady flow? With a special water? Both wrong to believe U.S. researchers and the problem went wherever it arises - on the chip itself

 

Computer processors generate heat. That is inevitable, so long as the electrons through the microchip traces be hunted. The resulting heat is simply a waste product of the electrical processes in the chip. The basic principle: The higher a processor is switched, so the sooner he works and the more switching operations per second, he points out, the hotter it is. Under full load could be such a smooth chip used as a kettle. Temperatures of hundreds of degrees Celsius or more are not uncommon.

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CPU cooler (small model): the future, the cooling in the chip to be integrated

The problem of the increasing heat with increasing frequency, the chip manufacturer years ago led the race for ever higher clock speeds to an end. Instead, it strives to now, more processor cores on one chip to accommodate. The aim at relatively low frequencies already high performance. The problem of waste remained, however.

Usually the fans from the PC case gepustet. In order for the above works, set the major processors lamellas cooler, which multiply the surface and thus improve the heat removal. An alternative is for water cooling. Like a car engine water takes the heat on the processor, is used by a pump to radiators transported to back down there to be.

Nanomaterials should help

Both methods have drawbacks: You need a lot of space in the cabinet, make the computer difficult and, depending on the version, even loud. But this must not happen.

This view at least some U.S. researchers. Together, the companies Intel, RTI International, and the University Arizona State a micro-refrigerator for computer chips. The will allow the heat to finish right there, where it arises, ie on the chip itself elaborate designs, as with current cooling systems are needed, should it become obsolete.

This will be possible to make a material that the researchers as a nanostructured thin film super-lattice designate. This is one very good power forward can, but if well insulated. Moreover, he ascribed to the property that its temperature drops 55 degrees Celsius, when you create an electric current.

The introduction is a price issue

The whole chip, however, want the researchers in this way is not cool. In an attempt mounted a cooling with a floor area of 0.4 square millimeters to a processor and both by how much the degree of temperature in which the mini-cooler can reduce the area covered. Their previous record: 15 degrees.

This is not yet everything to do with the cooling would be possible, however, are a good beginning, the researchers said the "
Technology Review ". In the future we could imagine, with several of these elements are particularly hot zones of microchips to cool. These so-called hot spots will be at the next-generation chip in ever greater numbers of the more processor cores on the chips together .

When it is the first micro-fridges in standard PCs given, is currently still unclear. A concrete timetable, the researchers have not yet. Still had a lot to do research. Above all, the combination of cooling and chip surface must be improved in order to minimize heat loss. Ultimately, it was only a matter of the chips to create another layer, namely the Kühlschicht to expand. Once the situation was, at a reasonable price to realize, we will do it, too.

As always with new technology so its introduction is nothing more than a cost issue.