Intel Develops Micro-Refrigerator To Cool Chips 94
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."
Re:Peltier Effect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Peltier Effect (Score:5, Informative)
Don't think of it as a peltier cooler... think of it as a way of instantly transporting the heat away from a particular portion of an IC. It is integrated into the IC itself, so it's not a cooler, but a heat transmitter.
So, for example, if I want to "over clock" a portion of my IC, but it keeps running to hot, I could use this to extract heat from the area and distribute it where it doesn't matter so much.
Essentially... the Watts of heat you pull from your CPU, aren't generated across the entire chip, but are commonly more localized. For example, cache doesn't generate much heat. If I can take heat from the FPU and move it to the cache area, I can clock the FPU higher, and have fewer heat-related failures.
So in summery... it's not a cooler!
Re:Pelletier effect? (Score:5, Informative)
Usually when a chip is running, only certain parts receive heavy use. These parts of the chip are going to be dumping more heat than the parts of the chip that are lying idle. In result, the chips has a few hotspots that are cooking your most important circuitry.
These mini-refrigerators will remove these hot spots by dispersing heat to areas that are currently underutilized. This should give the chip a more even operating temp and thus provide a greater surface area with which to disperse heat in general. The end result is that chips become more reliable and can be run at higher wattages without melting a hole through your chip. Higher wattages means that they can be clocked higher without error and thus get more work done in less time.
Re:Pelletier effect? (Score:4, Informative)
The purpose is to move the heat within the chip. You're thinking of thermal transfer from the surface of the chip to the environment. What Intel is concerned about is thermal transfer from the component inside the chip that is generating heat to the outside surface.
Currently, chips are limited (in part) by heat production within the chip -- the heat gets to the chip surface by simple conduction. It's the components inside, generating the heat, that are going to fail at high temperatures, though.
Fortunately removal of heat at the chip's surface is not a big issue. As you note, a thermoelectric cooler could push the heat to a set of hot fins and a fan. Water coolers have plenty of capacity as well.
It does not just move the heat (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pelletier effect? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling [wikipedia.org]
What's the carnot efficiency? acoustic cooling. (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry I couldn't fit what I want into the title.
Carnot efficiency is very important.
Peltier/Seebeck and Thomson effects are only 5% where compressor based systems are more like 50%
So Peltier thermoelectric coolers actually create almost as much heat as they remove. You also end up with condensation problems when the chip drops below room temperature.
We were able to reach -90C with a stack of Peltier cooler, but it was terrible efficiency.
Didn't really matter for overclocking anyhow.
But we had to hermetically sealed the computer and fill it with Dry gas and desiccant to prevent icing and condensation. We lost a few motherboards before we went to that level.
There is also Thermionic cooling [bre.co.uk], that promises to be much more efficient.
With my old company we experimented with many forms of cooling some passive (high thermal conductivity) and some active.
One of the ones I liked best was a Micro Acoustic Cooler we made. Never did get to do enough testing, but it also looked very promising, using
a gas in a very small tube that was hit with high powered ultrasonic sound waves. It was amazing to see it work.
Magnetic cooling was also interesting.
One very effective solution was a (active phase change) micro compressor based system that was equivalent to a continuously hitting the CPU with freeze spray.
Re:What's the carnot efficiency? acoustic cooling. (Score:3, Informative)
For refrigeration, you'd be concerned with coefficient of performance (COP), rather than efficiency. It's a related term, basically the inverse of efficiency, but it refers to how much energy you need to use to move a given amount of energy between two temperatures.
But your numbers are weird. A refrigerator at 50% (COP of 2) sounds reasonable for a small device or large temperature difference, but COP of 20 is really good.
A COP of 5 percent would be horrific. 20W required to move 1W, a modern processor would require more electricity than a two-burner electric range at full power... I'd only put up with that kind of number for very specific applications. (like, if I needed to recycle a small amount liquid nitrogen in a sealed, difficult to access device or something)
By the way, why didn't you just slather a layer of nonconductive lacquer over the motherboard? Surely that would've been cheaper than a complicated heat exchanger, desiccant and sealed box trick.
Re:Peltier Effect (Score:2, Informative)
In accordance with thermodynamics, there is no such thing as a cooler -- there are only heat transmitters. Any refrigerating device is a fancy way of moving heat from one place to another, generating a little extra heat in the process.
There is nothing in the laws of thermodynamics that would imply there's no such thing as a cooler. You either badly misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics, or you badly misunderstand what the word "cooler" means. I'm guessing the latter. A cooler is something that cools something else down. There's nothing in the definition of "cooler" that dictates how it does this, so heating something else up in the process is perfectly allowed, and does not violate either the laws of thermodynamics or the definition of "cooler".
Re:Intel is also planning... (Score:3, Informative)
The declining technical abilities of /. editors (Score:1, Informative)
Where's the degrees sign Â? C by itself is a coulomb!