Cooling down computer chips on the chip

Physics Today : Heat is the bane of computer manufacturers as it places severe limits on how fast computer chips can run. Some computer systems, such as Intel’s Pentium desktops, have fans that blow cool air onto the circuit boards. Other solutions, which usually involve supercomputers, include dipping the entire computer in a fast-moving fluid to keep the equipment cool.But what if we could design a liquid cooling system that could be built onto the silicon chip?Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester have come up with one technique that could be applied to create such a system.Their paper in Optics Express describes how to make liquid flow vertically upward along a silicon surface, overcoming the pull of gravity, without pumps or other mechanical devices, through strong capillary action.It works by carving nanometer-scale structures in silicon, with extremely short, high-powered laser bursts. These grooves increase the attraction or hydrophile that water molecules feel toward the silicon. The attraction becomes so great that it overcomes the strong bond that water molecules feel for other water molecules.So instead of sticking to each other, the water molecules climb over one another for a chance to be next to the silicon. The water rushes up the surface at speeds of 3.5 cm per second, fast enough to allow any desktop computer chip with this design to run substantially hotter than traditional computer chips. Related link Laser turns silicon superwicking