This super radiator was going to cost 1 euro, but what happened to it?

One of the biggest impediments to microprocessor performance is temperature, when chips reach a very high temperature they stop working. This is why cooling systems are very important and the higher the power and complexity of a chip, the more heat it gives off and the more dissipation capacity a chip must have. Well, today we remembered something that we talked about a few years ago, the 600W super heatsink of cooling capacity. What happened to him? Could it be the solution to some problems in the future?

In 2019, the Belgian company Imec introduced a heat sink for electronic components that surprised everyone with its high heat dissipation capacity. It was a certainly complex design with a design very similar to classic liquid cooling blocks made up of microchannels 32 micrometers wide and 260 micrometers deep

. which are silicone, a heat-conducting material, instead of the classic aluminum and copper that are typically used to create heat sinks in processors. The result? Power dissipate 600 W per square centimeter there temperatures below 100°C on a chip under these conditions.

What happened to the 600W super heatsink?

The big difference between this design and other solutions is that it was designed to be implemented on or in a chip. So it has to be part of the manufacturing process of the same chip and part of the design. If we enter into the fact that this is Imec’s proprietary technology and that they are not the ones who manufacture the chips of the big companies

from the hardware world, then it’s very clear what the problem is. Even though it was promised at the time that it would cost a single dollar, the fact that TSMC, Intel, Samsung and other semiconductor manufacturers or founders could not integrate such a solution makes it a very nice concept on the paper, but not on the surface.

The other reason is that so far it has not been necessary to implement this solution. While it’s true that there are rumors of graphics cards with GPUs exceeding 600W, one has to assume that NVIDIA and AMD will have already found a way to dissipate the heat produced by their next-gen brown beasts cheaply. and efficiently. Since its research and development not only goes towards more powerful and hotter chips, but also towards developing techniques to alleviate this problem with its manufacturing partner

The challenge lies in ultra-thin laptops

Either way, the concept of integrating cooling as part of the same chip is interesting. Normally this is something that is usually left to third parties, but with the unstoppable increase in TDP and a trend to make laptops ever thinner, sooner or later a solution will have to appear that allows manufacturers to overcome heat and temperature limitations imposed, usually by the form factor.

Something like a 600W super heatsink in laptops would allow much higher power consumption chips to be installed. The results? High-performance gaming PCs and ultra-thin mobile workstations. Which will make today’s laptops of both types look like huge billets compared to what we’ll see tomorrow.