Diamonds, lasersand oil isn't the first thing you might think of when considering ways to cool chips and computers. But as modern chip designs pack and stack more transistors In increasingly smaller spaces, heat has become a critical issue.
To solve it, semiconductor industry throws everything at the wall. What sticks will allow you to scale not only AI data centers but also many applications in consumer electronicscommunications and military equipment.
As senior editor Samuel K. Moore explained to me between bites of a cold tongue sandwich at a deli on 2nd Avenue, not far from IEEE Spectrumoffice is better temperature control required for next generation nodes.
“As we begin to do more 3D chipsthe heat problem is getting much worse,” said Moore, who covered semiconductors off and on for a quarter of a century.
For special report For this issue, Moore teams up with associate editor Dina Genkina, who oversees our coverage of computer technology. They talked to the engineers IEEE conference like IDM And Supercomputers about how technologists remove heat in new and surprising ways.
“As we start making more 3D chips, the heating problem gets much worse.” — Samuel K. Moore
The first step to solving an engineering problem is to accurately characterize it. IN “Will heat cause Moore's Law to break?» James Myers from Imek in Cambridge, England, describes how transistors that enter commercial production in the 2030s will have power density which increases the temperature by 9 °C. In data centers where hot chips collected in the millions, such an increase could result in equipment shutdown or risk permanent damage.
IN “Next-gen AI needs liquid coolingGenkina introduces readers to four contenders for beating this heat with liquids: cold plates with a circulating water-glycol mixture attached directly to the hottest chips; version of this technology in which a specialized dielectric liquid turns into vapor; dip whole servers in containers filled with dielectric oil; and do the same in tanks with boiling dielectric liquid.
Although liquid cooling works well, “it's also more expensive and creates additional points of failure,” Moore warned. “But when you're consuming kilowatts and kilowatts in such a small space, you do what you have to do.”
As mind-blowing as servers in boiling oil may seem, the other two articles in this issue explore even more radical cooling technologies. One of them involves using lasers to cool chips. Technique described by Jacob Balma and Alejandro Rodriguez of Minnesota startup Maxwell Labs.includes conversion phonons (vibrations of the crystal lattice that transfer heat) into photons that can be transmitted through the tube. The authors claim that their method “can target hot spots as they form with laser precision.”
Meanwhile, Stanford's Srabanti Chowdhury takes a general approach to the heat issue: swaddling transistors in polycrystalline diamond film. Her team's technology progressed remarkably quickly, reducing the growth temperature of diamond film from 1,000°C to less than 400°C, making it compatible with standard technologies. CMOS production.
None of these solutions are cheap, so the future of chips will be hot as well as expensive. This probably doesn't bother the big artificial intelligence companies that are sitting on giant piles of investor money. As Moore noted while finishing a cucumber, “AI demand for chips is kind of limitless, so you have to do things that haven't been thought of before and incur costs.»
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