Slashdot Mirror
New Chip-cooling Technology
BillOfThePecosKind writes "Researchers have demonstrated a new technology using tiny "ionic wind engines" that might dramatically improve computer chip cooling, possibly addressing a looming threat to future advances in computers and electronics. Purdue researchers funded by Intel have improved the "heat-transfer coefficient" by some 250%. I never liked water cooled systems, and this sounds promising. However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
"I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
Produces? Hey, let's make a ton of these and solve the ozone hole problem forever!
"However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."
Great! We solved the global warming. Let's get cranking.
Cool!
FWIS The "ionic wind" takes place inside a sealed chamber, no ozone would be leaking out.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09
master0ne writes, "We (the folks over at InventGeek) have produced the first ionic cooling system for your high-end gaming system. This system produces absolutely no noise and in fact has no moving parts at all. While this is a proof of concept, it demonstrates that you can get the CFM you need to cool a system efficiently with no moving parts and no increase in power consumption." And another post
From Jan 3, 2007
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01
Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members. And my reply on that one.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2148
Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it.
The aluminum heat sinks were grounded. Here is another reply from Jonathan Walther Give John Sokol the credit (Score:3, Informative)
by Jonathan Walther (676089) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 03, @09:00PM (#17452802)
Back in 2002 when John Sokol was designing the first, and still the most efficient silent computer, we discussed the ionic air cooling. I think it was Bill Drury who first mentioned it. We put it off as a possible future direction to go. It didn't seem like it would be nearly as productive a direction as the thermal ground technology John developed. Time has proven John right; his thermal plane and thermal ground patents will revolutionize the computer industry fairly soon now. As a director of Nisvara, I can't reveal more than that at this time. But if you want a silent computer with no moving parts and even lower power consumption than these "coronal discharge" guys are claiming, get in touch with John Sokol.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Hmm then what is this 'Ionic breeze' thing sitting beside me that is blowing air around my room with no fans or other moving parts? Or the industrial electrostatic cleaners that have been around for decades longer?
New application of really old technology would be a bit more accurate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does this mean now that our computers may have yet another thing that can go wrong? They might break wind.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The problem is the power consumption on this thing. If you assume that they want to move all the air in a small region around the wire even once per second, say 10mm x 1mm x 1cm, to use the dimension quoted in TFA and nominal orders of magnitude for chip size and wire thickness, that corresponds to something ~ 10^-5 moles of air. Since Nitrogen has an ionization energy of 1402.3 kJ/mol (Wikipedia), that means if you want to move that quantity of air every second, you need at least something around 15W. That's even assuming you perfectly convert electrical energy into removing electrons from air molecules, and it's just to ionize the air, neglecting the extra energy it then takes to get the ions moving (we'll pretend the fan does all that, even though that would mean that our device isn't doing jack).
I don't know how much energy my laptop uses, but my power adapter is 65W, so 15 seems non-negligible.
HCFCs still burn a hole into the ozone layer, and the full damage from released CFCs and HCFCs can take up to 50 years as it is a chain reaction. I worked on air conditioners in the military and had to become EPA certified on the stuff. I got the "Universal" license from the EPA. The biggest offender in this area is still the US government. While most civilian vehicles have newer HCFC-based air conditioners, the military does not. And not everyone has banned CFCs fully yet.
From the Wikipedia:
"By the year 2010 CFCs should be completely eliminated from developing countries as well."
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This technology looks like it might deposit a large electric charge on the surface of the chip. This will have to be dissipated, before it dissipates itself by creating an electrostatic discharge on (or capacitively coupled to) one of the chips interconnects.
To avoid this the insulating passivation layer will probably have to be topped by an additional conductive layer. This layer, in turn, will increase the capacitive load on the interconnects and likely require additional chip power to switch them.
I expect it will still be a big net improvement. But deploying it won't be trivial.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually most people are buying these powerful, speedy processors that underclock themselves to cut down on power and heat. Both AMD and Intel have been very mindful of power and heat consumption lately. Literally processors have more power than what we're throwing at them. Clock-speed has not been racing upwards significantly the past few years, but power consumption has been going down and efficiency going up.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Science fiction movies have been showing us for years that future computers spew fountains of sparks at the slightest disturbance. And soon they will.
that would be like getting a woolen jumper big enough and a comb long enough to power your computer with static electricity.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Try running a Core 2 Quad and 8800 Ultra together - your PC will become a space heater. Nice in the winter perhaps but not good for hot summers without air conditioning. All this will do is keep the CPU a bit cooler, but the same amount of heat will be generated.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC