Start-up firm Cooligy yesterday announced a new processor-cooling technology, developed in cooperation with Apple, Intel, AMD and DARPA. The technology – Cooligy"s Active Micro-Channel Cooling – was developed at Stanford University"s mechanical engineering department. It"s a solution that can "effectively cool the next breed of powerful, hot microprocessors" in high-end computers. The company took the wraps off its new technology yesterday, and will begin shipping "qualifying systems" to computer manufacturers later this year. Active Micro-Channel Cooling uses "common materials to produce a noiseless closed-loop active cooling system for CPUs, ASICS, graphics chips, and the large programmable gate arrays", the company says. "The method was successfully modelled and prototyped in cooperation with Intel, AMD, Apple, and DARPA. The Intel test produced the highest performance Intel had ever seen from any cooling technology," the company explains.
Passive vs active
Cooligy"s explanatory notes say: "The next generation of microprocessors, the semiconductor "brains" of computers, not only produce higher overall temperatures but also create one or more concentrated hot-spots of particularly high heat on the chip. These hot spots, typically found above areas where the most amount of work is performed on the chip, must be kept to within a specified temperature to ensure high-performance and reliability. Traditional means of cooling these chips, such as heat sinks, fan sinks and heat pipes, require a large mass of metal to passively absorb and spread the heat to air-cooled fins. These passive technologies cannot effectively cool the hot-spots produced in next-generation microprocessors."