At the BroadGroup Power and Cooling Summit in London, IBM researchers presented an innovative approach for improving the cooling of computer chips, an increasingly urgent need given the large amount of heat released by today"s more powerful processors and the additional energy required for removing that heat.
The technique, called "high thermal conductivity interface technology," allows a twofold improvement in heat removal over current methods. This paves the way for continued development of creative electronic products through the use of more powerful chips without complex and costly systems simply to cool them.
As chip performance continues to progress according to Moore"s Law, efficient chip cooling has become one of the most vexing problems for designers of electronic products. The IBM technique outlined today is one of several being explored by scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory to address the issue.