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New silent, microchip-sized computer “fan” has no moving parts


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Engineers harnessing the same physical property that drives silent household air purifiers have created a miniaturized device that is now ready for testing as a silent, ultra-thin, low-power and low maintenance cooling system for laptop computers and other electronic devices.

lefthttp://hypography.com/gallery/files/2/5/2/6/microfan1_h_thumb.jpg[/img]The compact, solid-state fan, developed with support from NSF's Small Business Innovation Research program, is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. It produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

 

Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies, Inc., of Marietta, Ga. will present their RSD5 solid-state fan at the 24th Annual Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium (Semi-Therm) in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2008. The device is the culmination of six years of research that began while the researchers were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

 

"The RSD5 is one of the most significant advancements in electronics cooling since heat pipes. It could change the cooling paradigm for mobile electronics," said Singhal.

 

The RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity). The wires lie within un-charged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shape to partially envelop the wires.

 

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

 

"The technology is a breakthrough in the design and development of semiconductors as it brings an elegant and cost effective solution to the heating problems that have plagued the industry," said Juan Figueroa, the NSF SBIR program officer who oversaw the research.

 

With the breakthrough of the contoured surface, the researchers were able to control the micro-scale discharge to produce maximum airflow without risk of sparks or electrical arcing. As a result, the new device yields a breeze as swift as 2.4 meters per second, as compared to airflows of 0.7 to 1.7 meters per second from larger, mechanical fans.

 

The contoured platform is a part of the device heat sink, a trick that enabled Schlitz and Singhal to both eliminate some of the device's bulk and increase the effectiveness of the airflow.

 

"The technology has the power to cool a 25-watt chip with a device smaller than 1 cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips," said Schlitz.

 

This device is also more dust-tolerant than predecessors. While dust attraction is ideal for living-room-scale fans that that provide both air flow and filtration, debris can be a devastating obstacle when the goal is to cool an electrical component.

 

Source: NSF

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Why, I bet this technology could even be adapted to make flying machines that you could foist off on the credulous as antigravity machines. ;)

 

Seriously, I can see a “so what”, some downsides, and maybe another application to these nifty little corona effect blowers:

 

As laptop fans (in the case of my laptop, an 5-year-old Toshiba) only draw about 1.5 W, vs. a 30 to 80 W total for the whole box, I don’t think a typical laptop will realize much battery life improvement by reducing its fan power – though it would be nice to make them quieter. Integrating them with the chips themselves could allow better cooling for unusually hot chips (eg: overclocked CPUs), though you’d have to move a lot of air to remove heat at a rate possible with liquid cooling.

 

The article mentions breakthroughs that allowed the device to have a high enough voltage to move a lot of air quickly without electrical arcing/sparking, but I wonder what happens if you get them wet? Or they suck up wisps of cat fur, the bane of anything with a fan in my home? :QuestionM

 

Where I’d really like some compact, power-efficient fan is in my home heating/cooling ducts. A lot of these systems (such as the one in my house), driven by a single “squirrelcage” mechanical fan, are hard to tune correctly for the different fan-to outlet lengths, and mechanically noisy.

 

I wonder if it can be scaled up to high volume applications, such as forced air heating/cooling duct fans?

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  • 2 weeks later...
I wonder if you could integrate this improvement with the 500ghz SiGe HBT Chips. I would love to see relatively cheap consumer grade chips running at 100+ ghz speeds with little or no heat problems. :confused:
The article mentions integrating these small, moving part-free air blowers into chips. However, they’re still air blowers, constrained by the low heat capacity of air vs. liquid and solid-state cooling, so I suspect that liquid cooling and Peltier devices will remain the technology of choice for the highest heat producing microelectronics. In short, a smaller, better “fan” is an incremental improvement that may make some dramatic advances in everyday devices (for example, the idea of a miniature blown air cooler in a handheld brings a smile to my face and a gleam to my eyes when I think of it while waiting … and waiting … for the next page of a PDF file to render on my present-day Palm TX handheld :(), but won’t, I think, do much for high-end computer design

 

Concerning silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs): I’ve read, in articles like this 6/21/2006 one, about them being used for analog devices – primarily very-high frequency signal amplification – but not for very high clock speed CPUs or other digital chips. KAC, have you heard of such devices? They sound interesting, but I’m unsure if any actually exist.

 

When it comes to the ultimate solution to thermal limitation on digital computing, I think Landauer and others were on the right track with the idea of “reversible computing”, which allows, in principle, tremendous switch change rates with no waste heat. If you can bear with the ugliness of a PPT file, 10/30/2006 one by Mike Frank is, IMHO, one of the best introductions to the idea.

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