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Startup Offers Peltier-On-Chip
LowSNR writes "The South Carolina based startup Nextreme, Inc. is developing technology to put Peltier Coolers in chip packages, according to an Ars Technica report. The tiny coolers could be situated on top of local hotspots on the die and pump heat away through a package pin to the motherboard. Also, the Seebeck Effect allows the waste heat to be used to be harvested to generate/reclaim power."
Peltier devices on-chip have been used for a while, whenever temperature variations are intolerable. Some examples: Analog Devices AD595 thermocouple amp, which uses in-chip thermal calibration to ensure a cold junction of known temperature, and many voltage regulators and switching supply controllers that use temperature-controlled bandgaps as their voltage reference.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
In theory, yes; the chip is hotter than its environment, so you can put a heat engine between them and generate energy. The maximum theoretical efficiency of this process is given by Carnot cycle and depends on the heat difference between the processor and the environment and the temperature of the environment. With current processors you can't really exceed 60 degree Celsius, or 333 Kelvin, and the environment is typically at 20 degree Celsius, or 293 Kelvin, so the maximum theoretical efficiency is around 12%.
Of course, if you could find more durable materials, you could just insulate the processor, let it heat up to a thousand degree Celsius or so, and get nearly 77 percent efficiency. The hotter you run the processor, the more efficient the system becomes; a hypothetical plasma-state processor at 10,000K would give a theoretical efficiency of 97%.
It would also give a whole new meaning to "flamebait" ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The PCB is often used as a heatsink for SMD chips. It wouldn't work too well for a CPU, unless we adopt a new form factor with a surface area of 5,490 cm^2, or roughly a 2.5' square (and it would need a lot of heatpipes to make up for the extra distance between the CPU and the edges of the heatsink).
Wow... I just needed to reply to myself to say that I'm truly ashamed to have written that.