IBM has developed a prototype chip that is cooled by tiny rivers of water piped through the different layers of the circuits and components.
The research and design was carried out with the help of the Fraunhofer Institute located in Berlin. The pipes used are as thin as a human hair, and the use of water cooling within the chip is thought by IBM to ensure Moore’s Law continues for another decade.
The new cooling system was required to cope with the heat generated from processors manufactured using a chip stacking technique. Rather than having components sit side-by-side, as they currently are today, this technique means they are stacked on top of each other giving major improvements in information flow. By stacking the components, however, typical fan cooling cannot provide the heat dissipation necessary and therefore a new, per stack cooling method was required.
Thomas Brunschiler, project lead at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory commented:
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 … Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem.
In the experiments the researchers have done so far they are achieving 180W/cm squared on a chip that is 4cm squared.
The manufacturing of the chip is possible using existing fabrication tools, with the design of the interconnects between the different layers and the water cooling pipes meant to resemble a human brain. The problem they had to overcome with the cooling was allowing the interconnects to be sealed from the water while still allowing enough water to flow through to perform cooling. The finished product looks similar to blood vessels (the interconnects) running between thousands of nerves (water cooling pipes).
Read more at IBM, found via ZDNet
Matthew’s Opinion
I am most interested to see what the finished chip will look like as not only will it be a different shape from current processor design, but will also require a water cooling unit attached. I doubt it will look exactly like the picture above, but it may end up having a smaller footprint than current processor + heatsink setups have.
If chip stacking really is the way forward then you can expect Intel and AMD to either have their own solution to the problem, or be talking with IBM. It also potentially has major energy saving benefits if the water cooling system uses less energy than air cooling, which IBM believes is the case. Multiply the saving on a single chip by thousands in a datacenter and you can see where the savings will be made.
»read more from "IBM water cools processors from the inside"
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