Now it's just microns away from the burning transistors

Oct 6, 2015 09:17 GMT  ·  By

Cutting microfluidic passages directly into the backsides of production FPGAs (field-programmable gate array devices), researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology managed to put the cooling liquid right at the center of the action: just a few hundred microns away from the operating transistors.

Cooling passages cut into CPUs using water coolers will allow a new form of connection technology that will eliminate the need of cooling fans and heatsinks, and will allow the development of denser and more powerful integrated electronic systems.

Using FPGA devices from Altera, built on the popular 28nm process technology, the scientists managed to build a monolithically-cooled chip that can work at temperatures that go 60 percent lower than those guaranteed by similar air-cooled chips, which is quite impressive.

In a case demonstration in Arlington Virginia, scientists managed to test a liquid-cooled FPGA that was operating a custom CPU from Altera. The water inlet temperature was about 20 degrees Celsius and the inlet flow rate was about 147 milliliters per minute. This way the FPGA operated at a temperature of less than 24 degrees Celsius, which is 36 degrees less than the temperature the device would've got if it was operating under air-cooling.

Funded by DARPA, this project will most likely evolve even further

Muhannad Bakir, an associate professor and ON Semiconductor Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering said "We believe we have eliminated one of the major barriers to building high-performance systems that are more compact and energy efficient. We have eliminated the heat sink atop the silicon die by moving liquid cooling just a few hundred microns away from the transistors. We believe that reliably integrating microfluidic cooling directly on the silicon will be a disruptive technology for a new generation of electronics."

Well, according to phys.org this impressive little project is supported by no other than DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) itself, in their intention to build the first example of liquid cooling directly on an operating high-performance CMOS chip. Why DARPA might be involved in such an apparently mundane project is unknown, but it's only logical that progress in liquid cooling development is being made in times when transistor densities are getting higher and higher.