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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."
...micro-keggers for tiny little beers and a nano-couch backplane.
Finally an architecture without that lamo fsb that Intel can be proud of.
The idea isn't to remove the heat from the chip, the idea is to remove the heat from this ONE SPOT on the chip.
Basically they are trying to keep the core cooler, and dump heat to the transfer plate more effectively.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
When you move heat, you're concentrating the heat and making the hot side hotter. Heat sinks are rated in Watts/degree so a heat sink that is 10 degrees above ambient will dump heat 5 times as fast as a heat sink at 2 degrees above ambient. Thus, a Peltier device pumping heat into a heatsink will cause the heatsink to run hotter and work more effectively.
Engineering is the art of compromise.