D_o_S
09-06-2006, 03:46 PM
Alexander Mamishev believes he has just the thing for the hottest new computer chip.
A microscopic air conditioner.
"It's based on a phenomenon that's been known for hundreds of years," said Mamishev, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington. "But for the first several hundred years, nobody put it to much use. We are putting it to use."
The phenomenon he and his colleagues are exploiting is variously known as corona discharge, ionic wind or electrostatic fluid acceleration.
[---]
They are using it to cool down microchips. The digit-crunching work done by computers produces a significant amount of heat. Efforts to increase computing chip power and capacity continually run up against this limiting factor of excess heat production.
"Their speed is often limited by how hot they get," said the Ukrainian-born director of the UW's Sensors, Energy and Automation Laboratory.
Heat is why desktop PCs have fans and why Apple's Power Mac G5 incorporated the time-proven method of using water as a coolant. The problem with fans is they are noisy and not too efficient. The risk of using water, or any liquid, as a coolant is that liquids and electronics tend not to play well together.
Many researchers are working on the problem and have come up with a number of potential solutions. Most represent a more sophisticated and miniaturized twist on standard approaches to cooling and thermal management.
Mamishev, a high-voltage physicist in Ukraine before coming to the U.S., is taking a different approach. As someone who also dabbles in robotics and is writing a book on "fringing electric sensors" (the kind of sensor at work in those stud finders -- for locating wood behind plasterboard walls), he might be expected to do so.
"I came at this from my high-voltage physics background," he said.
A corona discharge is basically the product of some seriously electrified (or more accurately, "ionized") air molecules, also known as a plasma. St. Elmo's fire, which electrical storms sometimes create around wires or poles, is a form of corona discharge or plasma -- one that sailors have witnessed for as long as there have been boats with masts.
Besides sometimes creating visible light and wreaking electrical havoc, corona discharges make the ionized air molecules move. A popular high-tech air cleaner made by Sharper Image uses this phenomenon in a fan-filter combination sold on late-night TV.
"It's very simple in concept," Mamishev said. "The ions push the air."
A few years ago, he and UW doctoral students Nels Jewell-Larsen and Chi-Peng Hsu began looking around for financial support to pursue this at the microchip level.
Nobody wanted anything to do with it. But Mamishev, as a new UW professor, was able to cobble some funds together and, later, get support from the UW's Royalty Research Fund -- a pot of money created by the university's patent income typically used to "advance new directions" in UW research.
"They fund the crazy stuff," Mamishev said.
That was in 2001. With the new money, he and his team began working on the microchip air conditioner. Earlier this summer, after years of work, they presented findings at a major meeting. Now, the funders were listening. Mamishev and his UW team received part of a $100,000 grant from the Washington Technology Center to further their work in collaboration with Intel Corp.
So far, the UW chip coolers have only developed a prototype. But they have proved that it's possible to create an incredibly small "ionic air pump" that works by electrically inducing a corona discharge.
"We should be able to integrate this right into the chip," Mamishev said.
Such an integrated and tiny cooling system should allow for much more efficiency in cooling, he said, and for applications not previously considered feasible.
The UW's "cooling chip" has two parts, an emitter and a collector. The emitter, which is one-three-hundredth of the width of a human hair, creates the ionic air flow. The collector captures the ions at the other end of the chip. This ionic motion carries away heat and cools the chip. The level of cooling can be controlled by how much voltage is applied to the system.
All this is still in the experimental stage, Mamishev emphasized, and there is much more to be done before they can claim to have accomplished their goal. "At this point, we have just demonstrated the physics and our ability to manufacture it."
The next step will be to test their cooling chip after it is incorporated into functioning microchips in a computer. It's still not clear, Mamishev said, how best to manage all of the different cooling chips that would be operating at the same time in a computer. He and his colleagues are working on the mathematics of that one.
Source: Seattle PI (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/283716_coolchips04.html)
A microscopic air conditioner.
"It's based on a phenomenon that's been known for hundreds of years," said Mamishev, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington. "But for the first several hundred years, nobody put it to much use. We are putting it to use."
The phenomenon he and his colleagues are exploiting is variously known as corona discharge, ionic wind or electrostatic fluid acceleration.
[---]
They are using it to cool down microchips. The digit-crunching work done by computers produces a significant amount of heat. Efforts to increase computing chip power and capacity continually run up against this limiting factor of excess heat production.
"Their speed is often limited by how hot they get," said the Ukrainian-born director of the UW's Sensors, Energy and Automation Laboratory.
Heat is why desktop PCs have fans and why Apple's Power Mac G5 incorporated the time-proven method of using water as a coolant. The problem with fans is they are noisy and not too efficient. The risk of using water, or any liquid, as a coolant is that liquids and electronics tend not to play well together.
Many researchers are working on the problem and have come up with a number of potential solutions. Most represent a more sophisticated and miniaturized twist on standard approaches to cooling and thermal management.
Mamishev, a high-voltage physicist in Ukraine before coming to the U.S., is taking a different approach. As someone who also dabbles in robotics and is writing a book on "fringing electric sensors" (the kind of sensor at work in those stud finders -- for locating wood behind plasterboard walls), he might be expected to do so.
"I came at this from my high-voltage physics background," he said.
A corona discharge is basically the product of some seriously electrified (or more accurately, "ionized") air molecules, also known as a plasma. St. Elmo's fire, which electrical storms sometimes create around wires or poles, is a form of corona discharge or plasma -- one that sailors have witnessed for as long as there have been boats with masts.
Besides sometimes creating visible light and wreaking electrical havoc, corona discharges make the ionized air molecules move. A popular high-tech air cleaner made by Sharper Image uses this phenomenon in a fan-filter combination sold on late-night TV.
"It's very simple in concept," Mamishev said. "The ions push the air."
A few years ago, he and UW doctoral students Nels Jewell-Larsen and Chi-Peng Hsu began looking around for financial support to pursue this at the microchip level.
Nobody wanted anything to do with it. But Mamishev, as a new UW professor, was able to cobble some funds together and, later, get support from the UW's Royalty Research Fund -- a pot of money created by the university's patent income typically used to "advance new directions" in UW research.
"They fund the crazy stuff," Mamishev said.
That was in 2001. With the new money, he and his team began working on the microchip air conditioner. Earlier this summer, after years of work, they presented findings at a major meeting. Now, the funders were listening. Mamishev and his UW team received part of a $100,000 grant from the Washington Technology Center to further their work in collaboration with Intel Corp.
So far, the UW chip coolers have only developed a prototype. But they have proved that it's possible to create an incredibly small "ionic air pump" that works by electrically inducing a corona discharge.
"We should be able to integrate this right into the chip," Mamishev said.
Such an integrated and tiny cooling system should allow for much more efficiency in cooling, he said, and for applications not previously considered feasible.
The UW's "cooling chip" has two parts, an emitter and a collector. The emitter, which is one-three-hundredth of the width of a human hair, creates the ionic air flow. The collector captures the ions at the other end of the chip. This ionic motion carries away heat and cools the chip. The level of cooling can be controlled by how much voltage is applied to the system.
All this is still in the experimental stage, Mamishev emphasized, and there is much more to be done before they can claim to have accomplished their goal. "At this point, we have just demonstrated the physics and our ability to manufacture it."
The next step will be to test their cooling chip after it is incorporated into functioning microchips in a computer. It's still not clear, Mamishev said, how best to manage all of the different cooling chips that would be operating at the same time in a computer. He and his colleagues are working on the mathematics of that one.
Source: Seattle PI (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/283716_coolchips04.html)