IBM to cool chips with H20

Written by IT News on 10:08 AM

Technology are always improve day after day, and now is possible to cool the computer chip with water. As reported ad ZDnet.com, Scientists at IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin working on a microchip that uses micro tubes of water to cool, IBM announced this just yesterday. In electronic components are built in three-dimensional stack instead of parallel silicon water.

Water pumped a container refrigeration (purple in the image above) through the layers of a chip through the spaces directly integrated within the chips' structure (orange, above). Chips, developed in three-dimensional stack formation offer more paths for info to be processed and can shorten the distance electronic information must travel by as much as 1000 times, according to Thomas Brunschwiler, senior engineer at Advanced Thermal Packaging group at IBM Zurich Research Lab who is Chip work for almost two years.

The trouble, of course, is that this kind of experimental chip structure also generates a large amount of heat. To address the problem, the team has developed a system for cooling, consisting of micro water pipes as narrow as 50 microns - about as thin as a strand of human hair - these are interspersed between each chip layer. To prevent an electrical short, hair, as water pipes are hermetically sealed from other electronic components, first with silicon wall and then a layer of silicon oxide, said Brunschwiler.

Scientists have used alloys consisting of a mixture of gold and tin, which has a low melting point, to bond holders of individual tubes from layer to layer, not disrupt other electronic components. For use in supercomputers, the chip is five to ten years away were not available. It should be noted that this is not the first time water is preparing to come on board for cooling.

As many of you are aware, companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard sells server racks with liquid cooling systems. Researchers from the Tyndall Institute in Cork and Limerick University announced in March that they work in a liquid included in the cooling system of packaging that encases chips. And in April IBM supercomputer announced, which uses water along with its processors to cool them.