New Chip-cooling Technology

BillOfThePecosKind writes "Researchers have demonstrated a new technology using tiny "ionic wind engines" that might dramatically improve computer chip cooling, possibly addressing a looming threat to future advances in computers and electronics. Purdue researchers funded by Intel have improved the "heat-transfer coefficient" by some 250%. I never liked water cooled systems, and this sounds promising. However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."

Ozone production FTW

"I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."

Produces? Hey, let's make a ton of these and solve the ozone hole problem forever!

Re:Ozone production FTW

What the heck is "o-zone"? Ozone [wikipedia.org] is a molecule, not some kind of atmospheric zone; that would be the ozone layer, i.e. the atmospheric layer with a high natural concentration of ... wait for it ... ozone.

Re:CFCs and HCFCs

And don't go spouting nonsense about how they work just as good. B.S. Got in an older Toyota the other day that still had the old refrigerant in it, and the air it throws out of this little 4 banger is WAY colder than any new car I've been in, and that is several makes and models.

That's completely idiotic.

The fact that a certain car has a more powerful A/C is because it was designed to be more powerful, NOT because of the refrigerant. No doubt your old Toyota's A/C demands far more power to operate than any of the newer ones you've compared it with.

There is a difference between refrigerants, but it's a very small one, and couldn't REMOTELY account for your magical little story there. In fact, air conditioners have been getting more and more energy efficient over the years, at the same time that refrigerants have been getting less toxic.

Re:Ozone production FTW

everyone start digging

You must be new here...

Great!

"However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces."

Great! We solved the global warming. Let's get cranking.

If I don't, someone else will....

Cool!

ozone

FWIS The "ionic wind" takes place inside a sealed chamber, no ozone would be leaking out.

Re:ozone

You are quite right. The AC has no idea what he is talking about. If only his grasp of "simple heat transfer" matched his arrogance. This is not a sealed chamber. The ions impart momentum to a near wall flow and destroy the boundary layer. Good mixing at the wall = good heat transfer! (The article says as much) These Purdue dudes have a lot of neat electronics cooling stuff going on. I had the pleasure of getting the whole delivery at a seminar last Fall.

Well, as the article clearly shows

Red to blue = good!

Didn't we already do this one?

From Sep 17, 2006
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 17/2134250 [slashdot.org]

Ionic Cooling For Your Computer
master0ne writes, "We (the folks over at InventGeek) have produced the first ionic cooling system for your high-end gaming system. This system produces absolutely no noise and in fact has no moving parts at all. While this is a proof of concept, it demonstrates that you can get the CFM you need to cool a system efficiently with no moving parts and no increase in power consumption."

And another post
From Jan 3, 2007
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/ 03/1951256 [slashdot.org]

Ionic Winds Chilling Your Computer
Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members.

And my reply on that one.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21484 8&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=174537 66 [slashdot.org]

One was using the Ionic Breeze technique to provide just a slight air flow, but it increases the efficiency of the heat sink but a large amount. Problem that they fail to mention is the heatsink really attracts dust, just like the ionic breaze, so you need to get in there with a brush quite often.

Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it.
The aluminum heat sinks were grounded.

Here is another reply from Jonathan Walther

Give John Sokol the credit (Score:3, Informative)
by Jonathan Walther (676089) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 03, @09:00PM (#17452802)
Back in 2002 when John Sokol was designing the first, and still the most efficient silent computer, we discussed the ionic air cooling. I think it was Bill Drury who first mentioned it. We put it off as a possible future direction to go. It didn't seem like it would be nearly as productive a direction as the thermal ground technology John developed. Time has proven John right; his thermal plane and thermal ground patents will revolutionize the computer industry fairly soon now. As a director of Nisvara, I can't reveal more than that at this time. But if you want a silent computer with no moving parts and even lower power consumption than these "coronal discharge" guys are claiming, get in touch with John Sokol.

Re:Didn't we already do this one?

And if you RTFA, you'd see that this has as much in common with those past articles as a desktop fan pointed at a CPU has with a heatsink with a fan attached.

Re:Didn't we already do this one?

From my reading of the article, I'd say there's a fundamental difference - the ionic wind in this case is produced at the CPU surface, eliminating the trapped layer of air that is produced by normal (laminar) flow from a fan.

Pointing an Ionic Breeze at a heatsink will merely produce the same type of airflow as a fan, only quieter.

Forcing the trapped layer of air at the CPU surface to move should improve the efficiency of the cooling, though a 2 1/2 times improvement seems pretty high - obviously the boundary layer is a significant insulator in this case.

New Technology?

Hmm then what is this 'Ionic breeze' thing sitting beside me that is blowing air around my room with no fans or other moving parts? Or the industrial electrostatic cleaners that have been around for decades longer?

New application of really old technology would be a bit more accurate.

Only delaying the inevitable

Chips are eventually going to require cryo-like gear to keep it from roasting. We're not going to have that kind of equipment in our homes so it'll be back to time-sharing to run whatever CPU chewing bloatware we're running by then.

Re:Only delaying the inevitable

Actually most people are buying these powerful, speedy processors that underclock themselves to cut down on power and heat. Both AMD and Intel have been very mindful of power and heat consumption lately. Literally processors have more power than what we're throwing at them. Clock-speed has not been racing upwards significantly the past few years, but power consumption has been going down and efficiency going up.

Ironic wind?

Does this mean now that our computers may have yet another thing that can go wrong? They might break wind.

like this bit

The new cooling technology could be introduced in computers within three years if researchers are able to miniaturize it and make the system rugged enough, Garimella said.

Which pretty much applies to any other technology.

Power

The problem is the power consumption on this thing. If you assume that they want to move all the air in a small region around the wire even once per second, say 10mm x 1mm x 1cm, to use the dimension quoted in TFA and nominal orders of magnitude for chip size and wire thickness, that corresponds to something ~ 10^-5 moles of air. Since Nitrogen has an ionization energy of 1402.3 kJ/mol (Wikipedia), that means if you want to move that quantity of air every second, you need at least something around 15W. That's even assuming you perfectly convert electrical energy into removing electrons from air molecules, and it's just to ionize the air, neglecting the extra energy it then takes to get the ions moving (we'll pretend the fan does all that, even though that would mean that our device isn't doing jack).

I don't know how much energy my laptop uses, but my power adapter is 65W, so 15 seems non-negligible.

ESD issue?

This technology looks like it might deposit a large electric charge on the surface of the chip. This will have to be dissipated, before it dissipates itself by creating an electrostatic discharge on (or capacitively coupled to) one of the chips interconnects.

To avoid this the insulating passivation layer will probably have to be topped by an additional conductive layer. This layer, in turn, will increase the capacitive load on the interconnects and likely require additional chip power to switch them.

I expect it will still be a big net improvement. But deploying it won't be trivial.

down the road...

Link this technology with an optical chipset and see how much faster it goes! Insane idea. It could work.

Fact catches fiction

Science fiction movies have been showing us for years that future computers spew fountains of sparks at the slightest disturbance. And soon they will.

Power consumption, anyone??

Now this is all interesting and so, but what about making those chips be a bit more power efficient for starters? I mean save some remaining high-end applications, modern processing power is enough. More than enough for 99% of the applications.

It'd be nice if the CPUs would become more power efficient, that has so many advantages: lower power bills, saving the environment, longer battery life for laptops, silent computers for less need of cooling, etc. For now it seems every new incarnation of the major CPUs (Intel, AMD) is wasting only more power!

On BBC

This is on the BBC [bbc.co.uk] as well, so it actually may not be total "carbon nanotubes water to oil device" nonsense.

More Ozone than those ancient printers?

Many people are subject to large O3 doses on a regular base. In their office, sitting next to an ancient laser printer.

Keeping the chip cool is not the problem

Try running a Core 2 Quad and 8800 Ultra together - your PC will become a space heater. Nice in the winter perhaps but not good for hot summers without air conditioning. All this will do is keep the CPU a bit cooler, but the same amount of heat will be generated.

Dealing with consequences...

Why not make the processors energy efficient in the first place? I don't see why my laptop is heated up to 55C right now, when all that power could go into stopping iTunes from clipping tracks...

A poor answer to a non-problem.

Let's think a little first:

• Is there a problem here at all? Heatsinks cost about 50 cents wholesale. Processor heat production is going down. I do't think there's much of a problem here to be solved at all.
• Is this a good solution for the non-problem? There are lots of cheap and tried-and-true alternatives, such as heat pipes, conduction cooling to the case, and just bigger heatsinks.
• How well are microscopic pinpoints going to work with your typical dusty air? How much energy does it take to move all that air? A wild-butt-guess suggests not good numbers at all.

It's a "lifter"

It is: "The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10 millimeters above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an "ionic wind."

Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft [wikipedia.org]

Even Mythbusters managed to get one to work, so Purdue should have no problem. Not until someone applies "prior art" from T.T. Brown's patents and shoots down their (incl. Intel's) aspirations of ... profit!

I've seen this before...

Ionic wind engines not only keep the chips cool, but they promise to leave them smelling fresh and clean. I learned all about this technology on a late-night infomercial :)

Propulsion Applications?

I've always wondered, could you use this technology for propulsion? Create an ion wind and push it behind you? Is it possible? Why hasn't it been done?

Hmm...

... I wonder about potential ESD problems (pun intended).

Re:Ozone

Those ion air filters are a scam, they work about as well as your monitor does at cleaning the air. Also, the ozone they create is deadly, good thing though, because morons who buy them without doing even a tiny amount of research, and thinking the advetizing point of "produces ozone!!!1111!" is great, deserve to die from the polluted air they are creating.