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Bell Labs Plants Nanograss to Cool Mobile Chips
LoadWB writes "TechWeb has an article about Bell Labs' new liquid cooling technology for mobile processors. The tech, called 'nanograss' is described as 'tiny tubes that spray liquid on chip hot spots.' The use of this cooling technology reduces the power required to actively remove heat from mobile processors. Other applications are possible, but it seems it was primarily developed for use with mobile CPUs."
Apple could maybe use this and come out with those wonderful g5 powerbooks some time soon.
Ahhhh.... G5 powerbook....drooling...
but can you smoke it?
Seriously, though, the technology looks pretty cool. The article likens it to a radiator so liquid is recycled in the closed system and liquid applied to the spot that needs it most. Only the requisite amount of liquid would be pushed through the system in order to reduce energy costs of pushing the liquid. Neat stuff.
Its so small, it requires a microscipe to roll a doobie.
That we will have to refill whatever liquid they spray on the chip periodically.
......
And you know it will be some over priced propriatary form of water
Let's get small! Early and often. Apologies to Steve Martin.
Error 0C001A41 - Processor has run out of liquid coolant. Please refill, then reboot.
I think the "in diameter" was implied by the fact that the sentence structure was parralleling the previous sentence . If Item A is several hundred microns in diameter, and Item B is 100 microns, I think it's safe to say (unless we're being tested on logic here) that Item B is 100 microns in diameter.
You're overreacting.
--
RumorsDaily
You still have the problem of getting the energy from the cpu out of the computer, just because you move it from the chip to the liquid doesn't really help all that much in itself. You still have all the same old problems. Apparently they have managed to come up with something, but it doesn't really seem to be such a great innovation as it is being hyped up to be..
In other news, John Deere has just released the "NanoMower".
The NanoHippy add-on (for nanograss collection) is TBA. NanoNarc soon to follow. No word as to the cooling effects of either.
Brings a whole new meaning to watering the grass. . .
Seriously though, its nice to see some new heat dissipation technologies. . . but it still comes down to how much thermal energy the chip pumps out. . . this is merely equivalent to a more efficient fan/heatsink. Though it should keep the chips at a cooler temperature (compared to their standard air counterparts) your laptop is still gonna get way too hot to put on your lap.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
It's cool, but it sounds awfully complex. Wouldn't small amounts of impurity gum up the works pretty quickly?
This looks like really good stuff, being able to localise the temperature dissipation would be handy for lots of technologies. I hope that this one gets developed fully and hits the markets soon. The better the cooling capacity the more we can clock our chips :)
:P). The likelyhood is that by the time the liquid would need replacing - if ever, the phone would be at lesat a few years old, and so the owner would probably have it lying around in some drawer since they got their brand spanking new top of the range all singing all dancing holographic video phone...
As for having to refill the cooling agent periodically, I doubt that this would be a problem with mobile phones, this would be a completly self contained cooling system, much like a heatsink is today, (only a heatsink doesnt have a liquid running around the inside of it
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
but what happens when the mad nano cows invade your CPU for dinner?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
so the next gen laptops will use less power, be cooler, powerful, AND stoned?
Processor I mean!
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The cops can't find it!
Just lots of them on a microscopic scale.
I hope it doesn't come with odors.
0x2b or not 0x2b, the answer is -1
While this technology is great and all, it strikes me that it much have only limited applications. Most notebooks these days are designed to minimize power consumption. In doing so, most notebook processors generate minimal heat. The only practical application for this would be high-end desktop replacements, which can generate insane amounts of heat. I remember an old gaming laptop I had that would get so hot playing UT2003 I would have to stop playing because it burned my fingers.
Im pretty sure I saw this technology being used in porno.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Sure...this is a great idea, but how much will it cost? Anybody else remember the days where a good cpu fan cost significantly more than the $20 it does today? Not to mention the cost of refilling the coolant. Yes, you will have to do that. Those of us who have a car know that the radiator fluid must be changed ...oh every five to eight years or so. Keeping in mind the a computer's life span is much shorter, but also taking into account that a computer is often left on and running for days on end, it would probably have to be replaced at least once or twice. I also doubt this is something most users could do--and even some techies might have problems. (Is the coolant toxic?) How much would it cost to have somebody 'service' your computer's cooling device? If such problems aren't answered I doubt the product will be viable in the home-use market.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
Wouldn't this require a CPU to be operated in only one orientation?
Chip H.
Cooling liquids in portable devices. Sounds like a bad idea to me. What if you break it? That would most definitely not be fun.
when it sees your hi-res porn collection, good to see its finally getting involved instead of just sitting there counting numbers
A>S
This was called MEMS fluidics before, and is being researched at many places for at least 2-3 years now. The term nanograss is just a buzz word to take advantage of the term "nano". If the channels are 100s of microns, how can they be "nano"? Its obviously a marketing term. Lots of research is going on in MEMS fluidics, specially for molecular biology and diagnosis. Thinsg like lab-on-a-chip, etc.
Wouldn't this produce steam or condensation? Water or liquids don't just disappear - if there is no other form of matter created that means build up - right?
What happens if another substance gets mixed into this liquid?? - say a piece of carbon from the chip??
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Elaborating on the messages about clogging and heat dissipation...
Inkjet printers are made with disposable heads attached to the ink cartidge, because clogging of those tiny pipes is a real problem. I can just see you powering your nanograss-cooled computer up after an extended downtime and having it overheat because the tubes were clogged.
And you still have to get rid of the heat somehow.
Hopefully as more information becomes available we'll find that there's some general misunderstanding about what the actual technology is.
Maybe by Cray a while back? Can someone confirm?
Chip-generated heat, for example, can cause blade servers in densely packed racks to overheat, and can suck up notebook battery juice by requiring power-hungry coolant systems.
Your average CPU fan will consume approximately 0.5W of power. It is cheap, relatively reliable and it works.
This fan alone would run for about 70 hours on a 3000mAh battery. Compare that to the average battery life time of a modern laptop and you will see that fans are not exactly power-hungry coolant systems.
Why replace something that works well? I believe we need more efficient chips, not better cooling technology.
I always thought that nanotechnology was things that were in de order of a nanometer in circumference.
and added to that: where is my superconducting chip anyway? reading the publications from Bell Labs in nature around 2001 and 2002 i thought they would come up with that stuff pretty soon. here is a funny story about that. Sorry about the pwd protectionShow a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Guys, certainly a great pleasure to see so much interest in our technology.
i ?12664
Unfortunately, the TechWeb article is not that accurate. In particular, the statement that "nanograss" consists of tiny tubes that can spray liquid on chip hot spots is totally off mark.
What we call "nanograss" is a carpet of tiny nanocolumns (or nanoposts, but not tubes) each several hundred nanometers in diameter that cover the surface of say microchannel. The posts are treated with water repellant polymer coating and thus are not easy to wet. As the result the cooling liquid (such as water) can't penetrate inside this carpet and stays suspended on the tips of the nanoposts. Thus, flow of a liquid in a microchannel that has walls covered with the nanograss requires much less pressure head than in a regular channel. The liquid literally slides along the walls without touching them suspended by a tiny layer of air as in air hockey table.
Now, the trick is that we can intentionally design the nanograss such, that it can hold the liquid suspended on nanoposts only at the temperatures below a certain predetermined threshold. If the temperature exceeds this threshold the liquid sags through the nanograss and gets into direct contact with the wall. Needless to say that in this case thermal transfer from the wall to the liquid is greatly enhanced; the thin layer of air that isolates the wall from the cooling liquid is now gone. Thus the microchannels with the coolant that are located above the hottest areas on the chip (so-called hot spots) will have coolant penetrating through the nanograss and thus provide much better cooling exactly where the hot spots are. The system is self-adjusting and would automatically adapt to any arrangement of the hot spots. The obvious applications are in CPU and GPU cooling, as well as in telecom power electronics.
In addition to the application in cooling, there are multiple applications in other areas, ranging from electrical nano-batteries and biochem lab-on-a-chip devices to seagoing vessels. Indeed, wherever we have liquids we also have solid surfaces that contact them; thus you can think of a countless nanograss applications out there.
For those of you who are interested in further details the link to the Bell Labs press release is
http://www.newstream.com/cgi-bin/display_story.cg
Also, the work will be published in May, 11 issue of Langmuir.
Best Regards, Tom Krupenkin
I would like to see this used in cars to upgrade computers in cars. The more Tech we include in the design of cars the more power we can squeeze from them. 2004 Corvette 405hp 21-29Mpg. Engineering at its finest.
Look at the little air filters on them.
Look at the operating specs, where they are only certified up to a certain altitude.
Hard drives ARE NOT SEALED.
Infuriate left and right
"...and it's all thanks to YES-I-Can-ibus"
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Remember to replace the nanofluid every three years or 36,000 minutes.
What a total waste of energy. Instead of minimizing heat, shouldn't these companies be focusing on how to capitolize off it?
The use of Nanotechnology is the most powerful proposition to come down the pipe in all of recorded history. It provides the power to recreate the world within the scope of our imagination. What a seductive possibility. But, all of the repercussions of of our actions must be thought out. The nanograss idea is interesting, but the role of actual grass is pervasive. Modifing existing grass seems vastly safer and wiser than attempting to make a leap to all NEW nanograss. Our track record for anticipating the results of such moves have historically been poor.
I wonder who cuts the grass and dusts on the weekends.. surely that is a consideration?
Jeoin
...future chips to be bigger and consume more electricity, which in turn shall allow them to support more junk instruction sets.
Huh?
No, it wasn't. Read it again ... they would be used in channels that could be as much as several hundred microns in diameter. A human hair is about a hundred microns.
When referring to the diameter of the channels, (which also have a length attribute), the following sentence assumes that the reader makes the syntactical association. This is exactly the same as the phrase "If the baby won't eat the cabbage, boil it". Although the reader knows that the writer is not talking about boiling babies alive, the very fact that the writer's style has assumed they will make the connection denotes a poor writing style.
Remember, "assuming" makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me".