IBM throws cold water on hot chips

It's amazing how hot advanced microprocessors can get - their heat dissipation can approach 1 kilowatt, 10 times that of a hotplate. IBM's latest idea to keep them cool is to pipe water through them. Its latest cooling technology runs hair-thin water conduits through stacked chips, chilling them them out much more efficiently than conventional backside cooling. The hard part: Creating a water-tight seal.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, have prototyped a new method for cooling microprocessors stacked on top of each other, creating a 3-D processor that could keep Moore's Law running strong for the next decade. Key to the effort is water, which seems to be the only material that can keep the stack from burning up.

"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," explained Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory.

"Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem," he added.

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