Cooling Chips With Lasers: Innovative Cooling Method Removes Heat Precisely From Hot Spots
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As heat dissipation has become a major challenge for modern data centers, various cooling methods have been tried and deployed in recent years. For years, the industry has relied on air cooling; then, big companies began to experiment with liquid cooling, tried both warm water cooling and chilled water cooling, tested immersion cooling, and even planned to deploy it in the coming years. There is one thing that has not been used for cooling yet: lasers. Yet, lasers can be used to take away heat from processors. But there is a catch.
A startup called Maxwell Labs, with support from Sandia National Laboratories, is working on a new way to cool high-performance computing hardware, reports The Register. The technique uses special cold plates made of ultrapure gallium arsenide (GaAs) that cool down when they receive focused beams of coherent laser light of a certain wavelength. Rather than heating, which is common in most interactions involving intense light beams, this carefully engineered setup allows the semiconductor to shed heat at precise locations thanks to the high electron mobility of GaAs. The method promises to assist traditional cooling systems rather than replace them.
To implement this in practical applications, the GaAs semiconductors are structured into thin components placed directly on high-heat regions of processors. Microscopic patterns within the semiconductor guide the coherent beams precisely to these hot spots, resulting in highly localized cooling, which ensures efficiency by directly managing heat exactly where it becomes problematic instead of attempting to use GaAs and lasers to cool down an entire system. This technique has roots in earlier studies: back in 2012, at the University of Copenhagen, they cooled a tiny membrane to -269C using a similar method, according to the report.
Additionally, this technique offers a unique capability: it can recapture the energy removed as heat, according to Maxwell. Rather than dissipating into the environment, the thermal energy extracted from chips can be emitted as usable photons, which are convertible back into electrical power. While this certainly increases the overall energy efficiency of computing systems, the efficiency of the process remains to be seen.
While the approach to use GaAs semiconductors for cooling is certainly an innovation, it is associated with extreme challenges both from the cost and manufacturability points of view.
[...] Currently, the concept remains in the experimental and modeling stage. According to Maxwell Labs chief executive Jacob Balma, simulations suggest the method is promising, but it has never been confirmed in physical trials as testing so far has been limited to separate components rather than a full setup.
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