As increasingly powerful computer chips both become denser and are crammed into increasingly smaller spaces, overheating can be a problem. Coming to the rescue, IBM (News - Alert) Thursday announced that it has developed a new technique to address this very issue.

 

Specifically, “IBM researchers have found a way to draw twice as much heat off of hard-working computer chips, clearing the way for server farms and data centers to use denser, faster processors,” an InfoWorld Daily report said Oct. 26.

 

The new technique—high thermal conductivity interface technology—was inspired by the hierarchical branching found in tree roots, tree branches, and human veins.

 

Here’s how it works: a chip cap with a specially designed network of channels on its surface allows the pressure applied when adding viscous paste between the chip and its cooling elements to be distributed uniformly. This in turn means the paste is spread more thinly than previously possible—using almost two times less pressure and resulting in a tenfold increase of heat transport through the interface.

 

Conventional technologies did not allow the paste to be spread so thinly, because doing so could damage the chip, IBM said in its announcement.

 

“Electronic products are capable of amazing things, largely because of the more powerful chips at their heart,” said Bruno Michel, manager of IBM’s advanced thermal packaging research group at the company’s Zurich lab, in a statement.

 

Michel added: “We want to help electronics makers keep the innovations coming. Our chip-cooling technology is just one tool at our disposal to help them do that.”

 

IBM noted that scientists at its Zurich Research Lab are also exploring other solutions to the heat problem.

 

One of those is an approach called direct jet impingement, which “squirts water onto the back of the chip and sucks it off again in a perfectly closed system using an array of up to 50,000 tiny nozzles and a complicated tree-like branched return architecture.”

 

Direct jet impingement has shown promise in lab tests—it delivers cooling power of up to 370 Watts per square centimeter with water as a coolant, and uses less energy than other cooling systems.

 

“Cooling is a holistic challenge from the individual transistor to the datacenter,”
Michel said. “Powerful techniques, brought as close as possible to the chip right where the cooling is needed, will be crucial for tackling the power and cooling issues.”