New 3D CPU Water Cooling Method

captain igor writes "According to this story on Wired News, a new company launched by researchers from Stanford has come up with a way to layer a silicon network of tiny tubes on top of a microprocessor. The system then uses a solid-state motor (no moving parts!) to pipe cold water through the silicon network. According to the article, this system can handle 1000 watts (yes, a kilowatt) per square centimeter."

Comments

It's not a motor

[signe]

It's not a solid state motor. I dare say, there's no such thing. By definition, a motor turns, therefore it has moving parts. In fact, the word "motor" appears nowhere in the article, so I'm not sure where the submitter dreamt that up.

It's a solid state pump that moves an electrolyte through it using osmotic pressure.

-Todd

Re:It's not a motor

[CaseyB]

No one ever, ever refers to such a thing with no moving parts as a motor, until today Probably because such devices are rare.

but it's apparently correct because of some loose dictionary.com definiton.

No, it's correct because that's the definition of the word. Just because you've created some narrower meaning in your mind doesn't make it so. I imagine that many people considered "vehicle" to mean "something that conveys cargo on land or on water" before airplanes were invented.

If it has no rotor, I dare say it isn't a motor.

That's funny. You must be terribly confused by the way all those space vehicles get into orbit without motors!

stove top boiling water experiment

[goombah99]

lets do some order of magnitude, spheical cow type estimates using simple everyday experience in the kitchen.

A typical stove top burner is order of magnitude 1000 watts spread out over around 500 sq cm: so were talking order of magnitude less than 10 watts per sq cm.

if I take a teaspoon of water an put it on a sq cm of stove top and it boils in far less than a second. really almost instantly so its probably like less than a tenth of a second.

Thus if this thing is going to not explode, the flow rate required to avoid boiling at 1000 watts /sq cm is going to be on the order of hundreds to thousands of teaspoons per second.

If I take a tiny swizzel straw and try to suck through it I cannot suck 1000 teaspoos per second. Since my ability to suck is probably within an order of magnitude of the cavitation pressure for atmospheric pressure water a pump trying to flow this stuff through an equally small crossecttion may not be able to sustain such a flow rate. And any on-chip pump is probably going to have a simmilar crossection for its fluid intake port. (off -chip is another matter)

unless this thing is actually flowing the water based on the steam pressure itself, I'm skeptical that this can meet the claimed specs.

but I assume these people aren't fools. Perhaps the science reporter slipped a few digits.

I'm sure it will be sealed with non-water coolant.

[antimith]

Considering the consequences of a little algea or whatever in tubes so small, I'm sure they'll provide the coolant(likely non-water) and perhaps even an on board Closed coolant system.

Considering the size of 3rd party coolants shown on site's like Tweak3d.net I wouldn't be suprised at all if the setups didn't look like some of ThermalTakes larger models.
If most of the tubing is kept in the in-die, and the motor is solid state (not sure what size we're talking about) then I'd envision something that would leak about as mutch as an air cooled system. hehe.

I concur

[goombah99]

Yep you're answer is better than my initial post. I agree with your math. (4.8Joules/gm-C)

my post erred because the reason the water boils is not the heat flux but the stored heat in the stove top coil. The transient delivery of this stored heat vastly exceeds the rate of power delivered to the stove and thus the water boils fast. but this would not be sustained.

I withdraw my original answer.