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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."
Forget about the cooling, tell me more about that pump! /me googles electrokinesis ..
apparantly it uses osmotic pressure to drive it, how cool is that?
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
/. is acting weird, so someone will probably have posted a similar idea, but ...
If you could figure out a way to sew this into material, then you could have some really "cool" (literally) clothing. I'm sure people like the Army would be very interested in a suit or body armour that offered effective cooling, esp in the desert where a system with a motor could be undesireable. I know it would be sweet to get a set of motorcycle leathers with something like this built in (those Texas summers get a bit toasty).
Cooling with water reminds me of primitive automobiles and their liquid cooling . Most of the energy of an auto is wasted HEAT.
,just google(optielectronics) but most are used for high speed networking. Optical buses are achievable in my opinion right now. Logic gates are another story.
Something new needed in chip technology. Moores law is about to END.
How about opical-electronic computer chips. Lets reduce heat ! These chips already exist
I wonder how long until we have nanotubes running all through the processor. There's a professor at my school doing research on 3-D photolithography, which would allow much more complex structures to be built out of crystalline silicon. This sounds like a good application.
This side up.
Actually, I wonder what the theoretical limit is on converting waste heat back into electricity in a laptop... would it be worth the extra weight? Even if it's NOT worth the extra weight, it might be fun to do it just because it can be done.
Off the top of my head, though, I'm not aware of any laptop-scale device for generating power from a heat source.
When the first supercomputer was built on Seymour Cray's farm by 34 guys with 1 PhD among them (a junior programmer) the key technology turned out to have been refrigeration devised by a kid from the Amana Colonies. Seymour spent his career fighting heat as he strove to get path-lengths between components smaller thereby driving up power density as the cube of his system's scale and speed. He most certainly would have approved of the focus if not the approach taken by the Stanford team.
Seastead this.
Someone will have to doublecheck this for me, but I seem to recall distilled water as being very likely to damage any system due to simple chemistry. Last I recall from high school chem was that impurity concentrations will travel from highest to lowest, and that if the metal involved has enough of a charge to it, it'll just leach out into the water resulting in local pitting of the metal (and eventual failure of the surrounding structure).
Other then that, isn't it more of a matter of finding the right liquid vis-a-vis thermal density vs. size of liquid molecule? I bring up the latter as I recall reading that the size of the molecule vs. the diameter of the tube (hydrostatical effect?)
Pity about the fishtank cooled processor. It'd keep the tropical fish nice and toasty. In a pinch you could always short out the board and have dinner available pretty quickly I'd figure (anyone have any ideas on how fast it'd fry fish?)