Technology

Nextreme to Give Chips the Peltier Chills

The new technology is successfully used for cooling laser diodes

By Bogdan Botezatu, Hardware Editor

11th of January 2008, 15:30 GMT

Adjust text size:

A Peltier cooling implementation - Solder alloy pillars

North Carolina-based Nextreme corporation has announced a new cooling solution to offer an efficient alternative to the bulky, noisy and power-consuming classical cooling devices.

The Peltier coolers are tiny, efficient, noiseless and can even be integrated into the chip's package. Moreover, the coolers can be strategically placed to ventilate the chips' hot spots only.

Nextreme's technology seems to be a derivative of the "flip-chip" packaging procedure which is widely used within Intel's and IBM's high-speed microprocessors and GPUs. It is based on building copper contact pads (for I/O, power, and ground) onto the surface of the processor die. After the die is flipped over, it is placed inside the package, facing down, and the raised copper pads are sunk down into a grid of solder balls.

The company suggests that some of the copper pads used in the design can be turned into true Peltier coolers to ventilate and cool small sections of the chip. Therefore, some of the chip's pins or pads (depending on the chip's design) will preserve their native functions, such as I/O or power, while the others will exclusively take care of moving the residual heat off the chip's surface.

The first product in the company's Peltier line is the UPF Optocooler module, an optoelectronic component (especially LEDs and laser diodes) cooler. Although this may seem a small achievement, it is a small achievement that demonstrates the technology is functioning an can be scaled to suit CPUs and GPUs.

"The OptoCooler module is the industry's first thermoelectric device to offer a heat pumping density in excess of 70 W/cm2, a ten-fold increase in heat pumping capacity over conventional TEC modules," said Dave Koester, Vice President of Engineering at Nextreme. "This is a major breakthrough. For example, this development enables direct cooling of a laser diode on a scale that is similar to the diode itself. This significantly improves efficiency and offers new, integrated packaging options that were previously unavailable."

TAGS:

Peltier | chip | cooler | Nextreme | UPF Optocooler

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: