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Wriggling Heat Sinks
YourHero writes "Purdue researchers have come up with a new way to cool chips, in about 2 years. Just build a bunch of little piezoelectric fans (the waving kind, not the spinning kind). Since they don't spin, no bearings, less self-generated heat. Since they don't have magnets, no electromagnetic noise problems. And, of course, super-efficient. A press release and abstract for your reading pleasure. Formal presentation at THERMES 2002 Jan 15th."
This is great! The best thing is the opportunity for ultra-quiet CPU and power supply fans for the pc. This means the drive is the last noisy component! It's good to be a geek.
is very cool.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The same reason cars use gasoline instead of electric or battery power.
You say make cooler running chips? Good idea.
So let's come up with better technology that lets them run cooler. Hmm... Smaller geometry? Good! Lower voltage? Good! Better logic design? Good! And how about... better cooling technology? Good!
Look back through the history of circuit design and you'll see lots of new innovations that either reduced power or improved thermal transfer. Now I'll admit that little feathers seems kinda wacky, but on the other hand as electronic components start to mimic natural systems (cf. hairs, cilia, feathers) they are probably taking an efficient path.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Cool!
Ummmm...I thought that's the general idea, dude.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
sounds like you'd just be waving the heat bye bye
"The concentrated circuits in a semiconductor computer chip can generate more heat per square centimeter of chip area than an area of equal size on the sun's surface."
Is this true? If so I have so much more respect for my heatsink....
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
the fact that there are no magnets has nothing to do with the electromagnetic noise..
You can get them now. ARM CPUs, for example. If you're willing to stick at a 233 MHz CPU.
The innovative fans will not replace conventional fans. Instead, they will be used to enhance the cooling now provided by conventional fans and passive design features, such as heat-dissipating fins.
Oops. Looks like the editor didn't read the article....
Does this surprise anyone?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Um... because gasolene has a higher energy to density ratio than steam or conventional batteries?
Or are you trying to say that making cooler chips is too difficult?
GPL Deconstructed
It would be nice if they made it self-cleaning too. Those things accumulate a lot of dust. I use my dad's 5.0HP shop vac to clean the ones I have. It makes a loud ZZZZZZZZ and sucks the dust right out of there! Sounds like that would break one of these. Neat idea though. :D
Doesn't anybody think it's cool to be noisy anymore? I mean, say what you will about being distracting and all that, but I'd love to impress my friends with a PC that sounds like a lawnmower. it's POWER! it's TOUGH! it's AMERICAN!
sometimes worrying about things like noise is too girly, even for me.
spacefem.com
However, they're not cheap. Pricing starts at $149. Additionally there is a Piezoelectric Resonant Blade Element. Interesting stuff. Hopefully mass production of piezoelectric fans will lower their price to the average customer range.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
Half seriously, though, you might think of superconducting chips to eliminate the heating due to the resistance in aluminium/copper wires. But AFAIK you can't build logic circuits entirely out of superconductors. The siliconductors (sic :-) we now use, require current to pass
through potential differences (energy gaps in the crystal structure). Power dissipated equals
current times potential difference, period. And there are lower limits for the voltage imposed
by the semiconductor used.
Until we get something entirely different, I'm quite happy to put my geekineering effort into the design of better cooling. I'm sure it can be almost as fun as inventing new kinds of logic chips.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This is just an excuse for designers to make CPU's less efficent and more power hungry.
ImagineWashington Post: Dec 13, 2018. Details are now emerging about the accident that irradiated much of Germany on Tuesday. Nothing is as yet confirmed, however, initial reports indicate that a heatsink was somehow removed from an AMD processor (PR rating 10,000,000). A bizzare terrorist group with the initials THG may have been involved. Containment was lost, and critical mass was reached almost immediately. AMD representatives have issued a statement in the wake of the carnage: "Obviously, they were using an improperly designed motherboard."
Here's a picture of an old-style piezo fan
You used to be able to buy piezo fans for the old Mac Classic (read the list near the bottom of the page).
IOW, piezo fans have been around since the mid-to-late 80's. Now, yes, I'll admit that they weren't very efficient (as in, they didn't move a lot of air)... but the concept has been there for eons.
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I don't mind the noise, but dissipating heat in general would be a good thing.
The thing they need to do is make chips that run cooler. And yeah, Crusoe's do run cooler but they don't perform optimally in a task-switching environment.
Cooling the CPU is fine, but the heat has to go somewhere and a better solution is to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to reduce the heat output in the first place. PLEASE.
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I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
What are the chances of the conventional ball bearing fans, in the very computers that are doing all the mathematical modeling, will go on strike??
Self-preservation is quite a motivator.
Yeah, basically. Gas cars are more powerful than equivelent electric ones.
Making cool but still fast chips is harder (and more expensive from a R&D standpoint) than simply making hot and fast ones.
And Slashdot is the only place that doesn't have it.
/.: why the hell am I here?
I have had one of these fans cooling my sterio for years. I got mine as a sample while working for a crystal manufacurer in 1984. It makes VERY little noise but does not even begin to move enough air to cool a modern CPU. These new ones would have to be 10 times more powerful.
I didn't see any specs as to the rate of air flow these things can produce. Assuming they are optimized given the 'provided' mathematical models. Any chance these models are as easy to understand as the instructions they put on coke cans?
The article stated that these fans could have blades up to an inch long, anybody have any opinions on whether this could replace the large fans in cars that are used for air flow over the engine and radiator? This would make working on your car while it is still running a little bit safer. But of course the saying "Make something idiot proof and somebody will make a better idiot."
And since the topic of energy consumption was brought up, how about using these instead of ceiling fans in our homes. Being that I have never seen one of these in action I bet you could make them look aestically attractive at least to us nerds. Sort of like having a huge rack of all black stereo equipment.
I swear I heard about this at least a year ago. It seems like it was in New Scientist.
Piezo fans, while a neat concept, are powerful weak.
The day a Piezoelectric fan outblows my screamin' black-label Delta 60x25 is the day Boeing demonstrates a transatlantic 300-passenger ornithopter.
I don't know what kind of chips these researchers are using, but the kind I use build up heat a lot faster, and thus need to be cooled constantly, not just every two years.
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"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
They're used in inkjet printers - they're in ink some cartridge when an electric field is applied to them and they change shape, forcing the ink out of the I also hear the they used them in the ipod for some sort of playlist control mechanism.
I'd much rather trust my components to one large, well made fan with some intelligent ducting inside the case to deliver the air flow where its needed. I think this is one area where some of the big system manufacturers still have a big advantage over a typical 'roll your own' case. Small cooling devices are just too fragile and unreliable, and multiple points of failure are unacceptable, especially in server applications IMHO.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I just love it how these 13 year olds spout off shit to try and increase their karma.
I'd much rather trust my components to one large, well made fan... and multiple points of failure are unacceptable, especially in server applications IMHO.
Every fucking server that I have worked on has at least 5 good quality fans. The compaq prolients that I'm working on now (quad Xeon's) has 2 power supply fans, two CPU fans, two fans over the PCI slots and an extra ventalation fan. All hot-swappable, all redundent.
I don't give a fuck how large your fan is, if it fails, you are fucked.
This is why real servers have multiple fans (even if it means muntiple points of failure)
If any company uses them in the manufacture of computers, I belive Apple will.
Perhaps this technology will show up in a new Powerbook or iBook. I have heard that the new Powerbooks often get too warm and the titanium shell does not help much either.
The new flat panel iMac could probably use them too.
Is that drool on my shirt.
Ok, I just got this be-yoo-t-ful image in my mind:
Imagine the piezoelectric fan on a larger scale, not just waving a metal+ceramic blade (single flexible surface area), but creating an undulating sheet about the size of a letter/a4 size piece of paper using stripes of piezoelectric flexion areas that create a wave every 2-3cm. Now combine this with the latest in flexible printed circuitry top and bottom (or 2 layers top and bottom, for the really adventurous). I'd imagine you might also need periodic non-flexible stripes (ends?) for components and connects that can't be made flexible. Then add a lower-power processor and put it into an enclosure only slightly larger than the wave height, such as, say, a laptop computer housing. What do you have?
You'd get a motherboard that cools itself by cilia-like swimming/undulation movement that pushes air (against the enclosure) across its surface silently.
You'd get quieter rackmount systems, with 1U or "blade" servers that self-vent. ("Ah, yah need tah balance yer server there, buddy, the blades are outta sync.")
You get a laptop that you might enjoy putting in your lap. (On second thought, I'm not sure I want to sit next to someone on a plane with a two-stroke laptop...)
just my $0.02
-Jon Espenschied
I think not...(*poof*)
One engineer I know told me of such a scheme about 10 years ago, maybe longer.
I'm posting this as AC because I don't know if he was supposed to tell me and therefore if I am supposed to tell the world.
He was a contract engineer, and the team he was on came up with the idea of using pezioelectric fans.
I don't know if they bothered to patent it or what, but I do know it's been done before.
Whadyou expect? This is Slashdot!
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
I see no reason why the same technology could not be applied to modern CPUs and computers. It would be energy efficient to say the least..
On a side note, if you want an interesting geometry problem, try to mathematically design a pyramid out of cardboard for a specific height and base.
Does this mean I can have miniature women feeding my Athlon grapes and other exotic fruits?
"Sometimes nothin' is a pretty cool hand." - Cool Hand Luke
I've been looking into this a lot recently, and there's some pretty (ahem) cool developments on the cpu front recently, with x86 architectures.
Some people point to the VIA C3-800, but if you have real computing needs, steer clear. It runs comparable to a Celeron 400, which is almost, but not quite adequate for general computing. Instead, check out the old reliable suppliers. The shift to .13u means a lot. Frequencies are so high and chips are so powerful that underclocking has become a real option. A good general target for fanless operation is about 12 watts. You can go higher with good case airflow, or lower if you're dealing with troublesome ambient temperatures.
Right now, you can take the Intel Tualatin pIII 1.13GHz (28W), cut the bus speed to around 100MHz, cut the voltage down to about 1.1v and be right in the target range. Of course you won't know exactly w/o experimentation on your cpu, but it *should* be doable. If you're worried about losing efficiency to bus speed, remember that you can compensate by running it on one of the PIII DDR chipsets that are now available (upping effective bus speeds to 200MHz) or waiting until February, when Intel says they'll release a similar part themselves. Additionally, the 512k (vs 256k) cache on the pIII-s will offset lower bus speeds. Just check out the specs of the PIII-M LV models at developer.intel.com and ask how they got to those low wattage numbers with the same core. Since the last fanless G4 was 400MHz and claimed (in its wildest fantasies) to be a supercomputer twice as fast as a pIII, a fanless 800MHz pIII is not insignificant.
Even better, surprise, is AMD. The current mobile palomino runs at 1.1GHz, 1.1v, 25w. This is clearly just an underclock of the current 1.75v desktop XPs. But what it tells you is that the AMD architecture is very open to undervoltage at lower clock speeds.
Now if you consider AMD's forthcoming die shrink, things really look good. Zdnet.de reported (unsourced) that the Athlon 1.73GHz processor would drop from about 75W to 45W after the changeover. Depending on how far you could drop the voltage, you could be looking at a 1-1.2GHz part running at about 10W! Fanless! Now imagine (a beo..no) 2 of these in a well ventilated case, with an MPX board -- 2GHz of dead silent AMD power! Wooo!
Alright, I'm calmed down. Back to your original point. It's really a shame about the alternative architectures. Every time I think of venturing into the embedded market, I get brushed off by the 2x price, 1/2x power rule. But since the ARM and PPC don't seem to be generating any economies of scale, at least mainstream processors are progressing fast enough to make cool, cheap and fast a real alternative.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Fans, fans fans. Might as well use a Tesla Turbine to move ungodly volumes of air with very little noise. No fan blades, no resonance with the heat sink blades to make loud whine or buzz. Just the hiss of moving air over the heat sink blades.
However, solid state heat transfer has been around for ages. I would love to find an advert for a 12-volt refridgerator for camping that I saw back in the 1970's. It used a pezo film between two heat sinks, one on the inside and one on the outside. Apply the voltage, and heat was moved actively into the outside heat sink, enough to chill your beer and keep the fish fresh on the trip home.
Put such a film between the chip and a heat sink. Gosh wow, a cool CPU.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
PowerPCs are cooler running chips.
Or did you mean cooler running IA-32 chips that can run Microsoft Windows?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I believe it was just a transcript of the Monty Python "nod, nod, wink, wink" bit, but rather than saying at the end "wot's it like?" they said "Do they run Linux?", as I recall.
Pound for pound the Ameoba is the most fearsome killer ever devised...
Well, atleast that's the old saying, I think a virus (not outlook type) might be smaller.
Doesn't intel run hotter Mhz for Mhz?
Or even power for power (power not being voltage, I mean benchmark ratings)?
From the article:
-nukebuddy
The motors have to be able to convert heat->energy to move...
i.e. heat activated, the hotter it gets, the more it cools!!!! Can't get more efficient than that?!?!?!?!
Multiple points of failure in a system without cycles, such as A->B->C->D->E are bad. If you're going from A->E, B, C, or D could fail and ruin the whole thing. However, if you had A->B & A->C & A->D, etc... then more points of failure are a Good Thing. Now look at another case. If you have a device A that does 100% of the work, and it fails, than you have 100% failure. If you have devices A, B, C, and D, each doing 25% of the work, and one fails, you only have 25% failure. More points of failure is good in this case. With a ton of these tiny fans, if some fail, the system continues to work without damage. Think, write, read, think, rewrite, think, preview, post. Try it.
Why bother.
Use them for wings on robotic insects and small flying machines. Would these flap fast enough to provide a good lift to weight ratio?
Does it really take two years to cool off the chip?
These seem pretty cool (no pun intended) but what happens when it's time to replace your CPU. Just reach in and grab the ol micro-fan heatsink and *crunch* tiny flakes of fan blades all over the inside of your case.
I think I'll just stick with my technique of periodically spraying water into my case.
>the concept has been there for eons
But what about ions? I keep seeing infomercials for the Ionic Breeze. How does it make the "breeze" and couldn't this technology be used to sink processor heat? The commercials swear the Ionic Breeze is totally silent, would definitely be nice to see in PCs.
i can remember to have read about exactly the same cooling technology in a review of an HP-X86 Desktop PC in a german computer magazine (c't).
That thas been somewhere between 1990 and 1993
They say you can use a surface of these fans each of which is only a hair's-width long to cool chips. Do they have any concept of the idea of dust?? Every six months or so I have to take one of those cans to my fans to remove the huge air blocking clumps that seem to clog up the entire fan. Are we gonna have to start purchasing a special cleaner that we have to dip these into every couple of weeks? My monitors have a pretty much permanent grey film that doesn't wash away on them from a year or two of the Los Angeles smog. I'd hate to see what particles that small will do to the effectiveness of these fans.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Seriously. How many new ways do we have to think up to cool down processors that are too hot to begin with? Why not fix the processor so it doesn't run so hot? Come to think of it, it's already been done by Apple/IBM/Motorola. It's called the PowerPC.
I'm not trolling here, folks. Is all this effort worth it? Why not just make the jump to a better architecture that runs 80% cooler? With all the effort that's gone into cooling technologies, we'd probably have a 2.5 GHz G5 by now. If you think it's impossible to make a radical jump of chipset, let me remind you of Apple (68k PPC), Be (PPC x86), WinNT (x86 PPC).
I avoid Windows because I think it's bad software. I use MacOS or Linux instead. I avoid Intel because I think it's bad hardware. I use PowerPC (AMD if I really need an x86 solution) instead. I think of it as promoting positive change in the industry.
Constitutionally Correct
" Since they don't have magnets, no electromagnetic noise problems."
Is that a joke? ALL electric and alectronic devices radiate electromagnetic noise. Whether or not they contain magnets is compltetely irrelevant. Current flowing in a wire (a circuit board trace) creates a magnetic field. This smells like a farce.
> Since the last fanless G4 was 400MHz
Hmmm. My G4 Cube is 500 Mhz.
Am I the only one who doesn't get the idea here?
$149 for a peizoelectric fan... how is this going to work better than a 1800's style fan? I can't see how such a thing would work at all, unless you had stacked peltiers.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Purdue researchers have come up with a new way to cool chips, in about 2 years . . . Since they don't have magnets, no electromagnetic noise problems. And, of course, super-efficient.
How super-efficient can it be if it takes two years to cool the chip?
Why don't you just propose a design for such a better chip? I thought so.
Here's my design: A processor that isn't catering to the 2% of computer users that need all the power they can get, but is sold across the board to the other 98% as well.
aren't claiming its anything new.
When I did brain surgery on my ancient Mac to slap in an extra meg and a half and a SCSI interface I had to install the 'flapper' fan or whatch my case do a Dali "soft watch."
Gluing a piezo fan onto the chip is not very smart anyway. And it does generate some 'flexing' heat where there is the least air motion. And it makes noise like a butterfly on speed.
You don't get something for nothing. Moving air other than by convection causes turbulence which causes vibrations. Vibration IS noise. Which is more irritating, a flapping buzz or a whirling whoosh? Its a matter of taste.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Student: Pay attention Mr Hat... WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?
And the rest is history.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hey baby, why don't you follow me downstairs to the computer room. I've got a wriggling heat sink that you need to check out.
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Let me give you the lowdown
the answer there for is case design.
look at Apple's case design. it is elegant, cables are out of the way, and the heat is disepated much more than in an ATX case.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Just manufacture CPU dies at larger sizes. Its harder to cool something that is not only thermally hotter, but has a smaller surface area. You can't extract the heat fast enough, and a lot of internal parts of the CPU get extremely hot with indirect cooling and being surrounded by other hot transistors and such. Just spread everything out a little. Just because you have smaller trace widths doesn't mean you have to shrink everything down. Intermix different trace widths depending on the length of the traces (so that you don't lose a lot of juice to resistance). And I'm willing to bet that it's easier to design a CPU that's more spread out.
Of course, I'm not an EE, and I could be just talking out of my ass. I understand that there are a lot of economic issues involved and other design considerations. But come on, how much smaller are our CPU dies going to go? Pretty soon we'll have a 1mm^2 surface area on a CPU with no good way to cool it. :P
Nobody will buy it, unfortunately.... consumers have been led to believe they need a 2GHz P4 to surf the web at its best. Unless you find a way to educate them, you won't sell anything :(
My server
Won't this be superceded by this thermoelectric heatsink?
It doesn't change the fact that cooler fast chips can be packed more tightly (fit in smaller spaces and achieve higher densities in servers, due to heat and power constraints)
It's almost always better to be more efficient; basic laws of physics and all, when you have constrained resources like we do... you get more done and more bang for the buck.
GPL Deconstructed
I can't agree with the no E-M interference statement. I can see there being less of it, but piezoelectric materials run on the concept of using a voltage differential to change the shape of the material. So you have to use electric current to produce the waving motion. I guess if the difference in EM fields is in orders of magnitude, than you can assume there is virtually no EM interference.
It seems funny to me that i had one of these fans in a 128k mac that was upgraded to a wopping 512k. that was 1985 if i remember correctly.
sigh.
We used piezoelectric crystals in a Genomics Lab at the University of Wisconsin and there are two problems that immediately come to mind at the mention of this application (and an afterthought).
For one, they are very costly. Perhaps with their proliferation, the costs would go down, perhaps not.
Second, piezoelectric crystals are very fragile. They have a tendency to crumble when too much force is applied to them. Unless this problem has been solved, transport of such a device could easily cause damage. See point #1.
Afterthought, there may also be a problem with condensation associated with the use of piezoelectrics. Without the air flow of a fan, devices of this sort are subject to water vapor condensation, which, as everybody knows, is a bad thing to have happening on your mother board. In an analogous situation, my brother and I tried using Peltier junctions to cool our hot rod, and the result was a watery mess. (Coincidentally, I now work for an unnamed company that relies on Peltier junctions for rapid thermal cycling, and to solve the condensation problem, we have relied on, you've got it, heat sinks and fans).
Ah yes ... it's more about the less than perfect form text-entry in mozilla than anything else. But I always use the preview.
This little piezo fan may be efficient, but anyone who says it doesn't radiate electromagnetic energy is clearly showing his own ignorance.
:-)
There has got to be something less than perfect efficiency and whatever little inefficiency it might be, it almost certainly has to contain some electromagnetic radiation. It may well be much less, perhaps even orders of magnitude less, EM radiation. But you can be certain that it exists.
Oh, and by the way, peizo effect movements are not new. I seem to remember ads for them in Digi-Key catalogs years ago. I seem to remember that they were quite pricey too.
You want a flutter in your lap -top? Get a feather.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
which is a Good Thing(tm).
With 5 boxen in the corner of the Dining Room, I'm under significant pressure from the SO to keep the sound pressure levels down.
"Battle (that's really my name), It looks like the bridge of the Star Trek in there!!"
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Nobody will buy it, unfortunately....
:(
Probably because they _already_ have a 500MHz PIII, which is WAY more than they really need.
Unless you find a way to educate them, you won't sell anything
The only way Intel continues to sell its new technology is by "educating" consumers with bald-faced lies. And, of course, by the OEMs bundling each new generation of hardware with the next generation of bloatware, so nothing ever actually _goes_ any faster.
I supppose you could always take a new 1500 MHz P4 and underclock it at about 500 MHz. That might actually not need any CPU fan, but it probably would not sell.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
If these fans really use 1/150 the electricity of a conventional fan, there should be an effort to scale them up to the size used to cool people.
It would be cool to have one of these sitting om my desk, flapping at me, while drawing very little power.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, that's what i'm trying to say. If making cooler chips was the cost-effective way to make chips, that's what they would be doing.
The chip manufacturers are only trying to make the most profit possible, not to make cooler chips, unless the market demands it to the extent that it would be more profitable.
GO BOILERS!!!!
Hail, hail, our old Purdue, all hail to our old
Purdue...
I also remember seeing a similar product used on Radio Shack Color Computers back in the day. I believe the manufacturer called it the Dragonfly Fan. It used two flat blades side by side that would bend (or flap) in opposite directions. I think the whole kit cost around $30.
You're and idiot. Just because the previous poster might not be able to design a cooler chip from the ground up, his suggestion is still very valid because of the fact that _someone_ can do it.
No, superconducting chip designs are possible, if you're sufficiently clever. IBM and other groups spent lots of money in the 70s trying to use Josephson junctions in a way analogous to transistors, so that the presence of a voltage on a line was a '1' and lack of a voltage was '0'. This was a dead end.
A more recent development has been to set aside these preconceptions and use the unique properties of superconductors. If you have a ring of superconductor, you can trap a quantum of magnetic flux in it- this corresponds to a bit of current flowing eternally around the ring. If a Josephson junction is part of the ring, it can, by changing state, release the flux quantum, creating a voltage pulse. Google for 'RSFQ' and you'll find lots more information.
It says as much in the article (initially developed in the 70s, etc.). It could be worth your time taking a look.
Also, listing the first link in a Google search is not particularly impressive - you should have tried the third link. That looks pretty cool.
Ok, what brands of heat sinks use Peltier Junctions? Where can I buy one?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics