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IBM Uses Water Cooling to Design "Green" Data Centers
Green Technology Featured Articles
June 05, 2008

IBM Uses Water Cooling to Design "Green" Data Centers

By Nathesh
TMCnet Contributor

IBM (News - Alert) labs have significantly reduced the power consumed by data centers by stacking their circuits and components one above another and using tiny streams of water to cool the computer chips. They have worked in partnership with Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin to design a trial product that combines the cooling system into the 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack.

 
3-D chip stacks have silicon wafers piled on top of each other, and have demonstrated to be one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits.
 
"As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor's capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don't scale. In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3-D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling," explains Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory.
 
"Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem,” Brunschwiler added.
 
The 3-D chip stacks follow IBM's advanced chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that was modeled a year ago, which shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
 
3-D chip stacks would have a collective heat dissipation of close to 1 kilowatt; 10 times greater than the heat generated by a hotplate with an area of 4 square centimeters and a thickness of about 1 millimeter. Moreover, each layer poses an additional barrier to heat removal.
 
The water streams that are used for cooling are as thin as a human hair (50 microns). They run in between the individual chip layers thereby enabling them to discard heat at the source itself. Scientists used superior thermo-physical qualities of water to show a cooling performance of up to 180 W/cm2 per layer for a stack with a typical footprint of 4 cm2.
 
"This truly constitutes a breakthrough. With classic backside cooling, the stacking of two or more high-power density logic layers would be impossible,” said Bruno Michel, manager of the chip cooling research efforts at the IBM Zurich Lab.
 
The assembling of individual layers was done by thin-film soldering technique. This technique is apt for getting good thermal contacts and electrical contacts without any shorts. The assembled stack is placed in a silicon cooling container similar to a miniature basin. The water is pumped into the container from one side and flows between the individual chip layers before exiting at the other side.
 
This most recent advancement is part of IBM's ambitious research efforts focused on cooling technologies that allow the reuse of heat generated by data centers by capturing water at its hottest and piping it into the building's water and heating systems.
 
This announcement marks an important step toward that goal by succeeding in getting water to the hottest parts of the computer chip, where cooling is critical.
 
Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
 
 
 
 
 


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