Behind me is a PC with an all-in-one closed loop cooler to keep the CPU from overheating.
And unless you're trying to perform an extreme overclock, it's a pretty good solution.
But even with the best cooler on the market, your CPU will still be quite warm.
You know what? Why do we need water blocks at all? I mean, look at this processor.
All of this space inside that black square is dedicated to an integrated heat spreader.
So would it be possible to instead build water cooling right into the dye itself?
As it turns out, the answer is yes. And to find out more, we spoke to Ellison Matteoli,
a professor of electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
in Lausanne, where he and his team recently developed an all-new in-chip cooling solution.
We'd like to give him a big thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
So a big part of their approach was to look at the electronics and the thermal management
as a single problem, rather than the paradigm that we're more used to where
one company works on making chips and another one works on making heat sinks or water blocks.
Instead, the idea was to design a chip in concert with an integrated liquid cooling solution
so that you would already know where the hotspots were.
To demonstrate this idea, they used a device that generates a lot of heat. In this case,
a power converter, and then etched water microchannels into a layer directly below the
gallium nitride chip that handled the power conversion, with small capillaries below hotspots
and larger channels operating as inflow and outflow pipes.
The small channels adjacent to the warmer areas of the chip provide lots of surface area for heat,
making thermal dissipation very efficient compared to traditional solutions involving a
separate heat spreader, heat sink, and thermal paste. Remember guys, you lose a lot of efficiency
with each step. The chip only got up to 60 degrees Celsius compared to the blistering 250 degrees
that we would have seen without cooling. In fact, their solution ended up being able to extract
1.7 kilowatts per square centimeter using only half a watt of pumping power. Conveniently,
a square centimeter is roughly the same size as a modern processor die,
and even high-end processors have TDPs in the neighborhood of just 125 to 250 watts.
So with a solution this efficient, you could cool a chip down to near room temperature,
especially as the process would work just as well with more familiar silicon processors.
I mean, the amount of heat that a typical chip puts out is a whole order of magnitude less
than what in-chip cooling could handle. But hold on a second, is this some kind of pipe dream
that's just never going to leave the laboratory like DNA storage, unless it does eventually?
Or could we actually see this in our desktop rigs in the near future? Well, it turns out it would
actually be fairly trivial for a big chip maker to replicate this microchannel process in a standard
clean room, and the research team in Switzerland has already had a number of companies approach them
about using this technology in the coming years. Now, the most obvious benefit will be
for server farms and data centers, where huge amounts of money are already being spent to
keep energy costs low and, well, processor temperatures lower. However, there's no reason
at all that we couldn't see it in our home gaming computer at some point, which could allow for
significant increases in overclocking for enthusiasts, or maybe even better gaming on
mobile devices or small form factor PCs, since this in-chip solution doesn't need nearly as much
liquid defunction correctly as a traditional water cooling loop. Understandably, the lab couldn't
tell us much about exactly which companies were inquiring about in-chip cooling, but that shouldn't
stop you or us from dreaming about the possibilities of having a water-cooled smartwatch one day.
Why not, right? Thanks for watching, guys! Like, dislike, check out our other videos,
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