Cooling chips, the future of lightweight computing devices
One of the main factors restricting the development of high computing power chips is their heat dissipation capability. The issue of chip heat dissipation has always plagued the industry. A chip the size of a nail cap is actually a 300 watt heat source, but in reality, the chip is already scorching hot when it is far below this power consumption. The miniaturization and high integration of chips can lead to a significant increase in local heat flux density. The improvement of computing power and speed brings huge power consumption and heat generation.
A report released by TSMC shows that in the future, some "large chips" with an area greater than 500 square millimeters may have a target design power consumption of over 2000 watts.Despite the continuous reduction in chip process size, power density is constantly increasing. Once the semiconductor process enters 2nm, the number of transistors and computing power of the chip will naturally increase significantly. The rapid increase in AI computing power will continue to pose significant challenges to the cooling and cooling of ultra-high power chips. At present, the entire consumer electronics chip industry has actually entered a vicious cycle of "significantly improved performance and rapidly rising power consumption", showing a trend of "exchanging power consumption for performance".
Recently, Frore Systems, an innovative solid-state cooling solution based on piezoelectric MEMS, announced that laptops equipped with its MEMS active cooling chip (AirJet) solution will be released in early 2023, providing better cooling performance than traditional fans while reducing noise.The AirJet cooling chip is a solution to the cooling problem that limits CPU performance in today's laptops. It is a so-called "solid-state cooling solution" that completely abandons traditional fan cooling methods.
In addition, Huawei and Harbin Institute of Technology have jointly applied for a patent called "Diamond Chip". This is an efficient heat dissipation chip made of diamond materials, which can solve the heating problem of high-performance chips and open up a new path for improving chip performance.Diamond is a crystal composed of carbon elements, with excellent physical and chemical properties. Diamond, as a natural mineral, has excellent thermal conductivity.Applying diamond to the heat dissipation of electronic chips can significantly improve their heat dissipation efficiency. Compared with traditional materials, it effectively alleviates the problems caused by long-term high-temperature operation of chips.
Although unique solutions can be used in some applications, most markets must find ways to do more with less resources, which means having more functionality per watt. The cost associated with this is much higher than previous solutions.
