IBM Enables Water-Cooling for 3D Chips

IBM, a leading manufacturer of computer hardware and systems, has recently announced that it delivered the first working prototype of its water-cooled 3D chips. The new 3D chips are designed to operate with multiple layers of circuits and components stacked on top of each other. This design is said to be better than the one that lays all components side by side.

Although the new design can improve the performance of a processor, it does raise some significant issues concerning the cooling factor. Last year, upon unveiling the new technology, IBM estimated that the design would allow chip manufacturers to boost the number of data transfer channels by a factor of 100 and dramatically reduce the amount of space required by data to travel between components. Still the company was aware of the cooling issue due to stacking the circuits and components on each other.

"As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor's capability to process data, conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip do not scale," said Thomas Brunschwiler, a project leader at IBM's Zurich research lab.

Being aware of the problem, the company has approached the issue by introducing a water cooling technology. "In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling."

Apparently, researchers at IBM have constructed a series of cooling channels designed to run water between the individual layers through structures as thin as a human hair. This new design has reportedly created a cooling system capable of providing up to 180W of cooling per square centimeter on each layer.

"This truly constitutes a breakthrough," said Bruno Michel, manager of chip cooling research at the Zurich lab. "With classic backside cooling, the stacking of two or more high-power density logic layers would be impossible."

In the experiments ran by IBM scientists, the water was piped through a 1 by 1 cm test vehicle consisting of a cooling layer between two dies or heat sources.