Intel Develops Micro-Refrigerator To Cool Chips

Spacedonkey writes "Researchers at Intel, RTI International of North Carolina, and Arizona State University have made ultra-thin 'micro-refrigerators' for computer chips. The device uses a thermoelectric cooler made from nanostructured thin-film superlattice that can reduce the temperature by 55C when a current passes through it. In testing, it reduced the temperature on part of a chip by 15C without impairing its performance. The researchers say the component could be particularly useful for cooling hot spots that frequently occur on multi-core chips."

Comments

Pelletier effect?

[Fastfwd]

Is this the same as a pelletier effect? I hate fans and definitely would pay a premium to get rid of them.

Re:Pelletier effect?

[Rakh]

It might be that the cooling element can withstand much higher temperatures than the chip itself can. Thus there is a benefit to decrease the temperature inside the chip, even if it that does make the other side of the cooling device much hotter, since the heat will not be doing any damage on that side.

Re:Pelletier effect?

[jhfry]

Imagine this...

circuit operates at 3GHz at 20C or at 4GHz at 10C. So you say, lets cool it then!

Well if you couple chip to copper heatsink and fan, you can't possibly drop temps to sub-ambient temps.

However, with a cooler, you can... so long as you can dump the extra heat fast enough.

The biggest reason peltier coolers are rarely used is that they tend to cause condensation, and they acutally generate additional heat, requiring even more cooling.

However, if you could create a small one, that was within the housing, cooled only the necessary areas, and didn't need to be sealed from the humidity... it would be this.

Re:Pelletier effect?

[goombah99]

It might be that the cooling element can withstand much higher temperatures than the chip itself can. Thus there is a benefit to decrease the temperature inside the chip, even if it that does make the other side of the cooling device much hotter, since the heat will not be doing any damage on that side.

Yes, absolutely, but that's why I said "to be more than transiently" effctive. You can only do that for so long before you are first limited by heat capacity, then conduction, and finally convection. Then you can't sustain the differential any longer. If we assume the heat capacity of the far side is roughly (in terms of being accessibly within a diffusion length) of the chip itself then the time it takes to heat it to saturation will be at most a handful of times longer than it took to heat the original chip. You can substitute what you like for "handful", say 2x or 10x, but since the original chip heats in seconds, where not talking much of anything except for transient imporvement.

at somepoint it has to expand the surface area or rate of convection.

Current drain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any word on how much current this takes? The last Peltier devices I played with took several amps; I hope they've got that reduced substantially by now.

Competition

[phorm]

While many have already mentioned the obvious drawbacks (heat may drop on the most-effected areas, but it still needs to get the heat *out* of the case), if this is still an effective and innovative method for cooling then I wonder how Intel would go about licensing it. Holding onto tech that would allow for a 15c drop in core temperature would probably give them quite a strong advantage over competitors such as AMD, etc, which might be worth more than the advantage of licensing it out...

Re:What's the carnot efficiency? acoustic cooling.

[Tenebrousedge]

The best idea I've heard for using Peltiers is in combination with mineral oil submersion, which handily takes care of both heat transfer and condensation. Power and efficiency issues remain.