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."

Re:Pelletier effect?

[PotatoFarmer]

Looks very similar. And, like Peltier devices, the same fundamental problem remains - you've moved the heat from one spot to another, but it doesn't just disappear. You're still going to have to get it out of the general vicinity of other temperature-sensitive components, and that probably means fans.

Re:Peltier Effect

[yttrstein]

You do it with one of these:

http://www.instructables.com/id/SH8YISTFPPG0L4D/

The heat sink for a piezoelectric spot cooler. So really no, there's not a huge amount of point until someone figures out how to do heat exchange with something other than heat conductive metals who's efficiency depends directly on surface area.

Re:Peltier Effect

[CyprusBlue113]

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.

Re:Pelletier effect?

[goombah99]

The thing I don't full understand here is how a cooling device that is the same area as the chip itself accomplishes much. It moves the heat.

It seems to me that to be more than traniently effective you still need tansfer the heat to something with greater surface area. And if the attached heatsink fins have the same surface area as before, what has been accomplished?

Arguably, if you can make the fins hotter they will radiate faster, so that could be one strategy. Or one way to gain is if you could extract work (current) from the heat. then it really would give a net cool. Usually however peltier devices actually add their own heat loads in addition to the heat transfer. Don't know about these, but the second law puts a limit on how much heat you can convert to work.

So where is the gain coming from? moving more heat with less added heat? that won't bode well for future improvements. Is it hotter heat sinks. or is it somehow managing to increase the sufface area?

Re:Pelletier effect?

[CaptainPatent]

It's not so much about dealing with the heat overall, it's dealing with the heat in the hottest places. The more heat bottlenecks you get rid of, the hotter you can run the chip stably.

Don't get me wrong, the implementation doesn't come without drawbacks. There's the higher expense for the extra circuitry, and the higher electrical requirements to run the coolers. It looks like the only need for this is on high-end chips and even there it's only absolute bleeding edge that'll need anything like this, however for the enthusiast, the CAD designer, the video editor or the programmer, this may just be a breath of fresh air.

Oh, FFS

[R2.0]

It's NOT a refrigerator. Refrigerators use the refrigeration cycle to move hat from one place to another. This is basically a Peltier. That doesn't make it any less valuable for it's purpose, but why didn't they just call it a "cooler"? I mean, it's not like the audience for these types of announcements is tech-illiterate.

How about reusing that heat?

[blankaBrew]

This might be useful for concentrating the heat in one place. However, what about using that heat by attaching micro-sized stirling engines to generate electricity which could recharge the batteries of a laptop? That would be kinda like a hybrid laptop: recapturing the wasted energy from the inefficiencies of the processor. That's something I'd like to see.