Cooling The Data Center


Since British mathematician and entrepreneur Clive Humby coined the rallying cry, “Data is the new oil,” some 20 years ago, it has been an upbeat phrase at data science conferences. But in engineering circles, that increasingly includes a daily grind of hardware challenges, and chief among them is how to cool the places where all that data is processed and stored. An estimated 65 zettaby... » read more

Wave Hello To Improved Performance


The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that in 2019, approximately 33 percent of all transportation-related CO2 emissions were generated by buses and light to heavy commercial vehicles. Transitioning to electric drives in this sector could clearly have a significant impact on reducing our emissions, but electrifying such demanding vehicles is not an easy task. Many of the concepts... » read more

How Climate Change Affects Data Centers


Data centers are hot, and they may get even hotter. As climate change impacts temperatures around the world, designers are changing the computing hubs that are tied to nearly every aspect of modern life to make them more efficient, more customized, and potentially more disaggregated. These shifts are taking on new urgency as the tech industry grapples with months of sweltering temperatures o... » read more

Monolithic Microfluidic Cooling on a Functional CPU Running Real-World Benchmarks


New technical paper titled "Integrated Silicon Microfluidic Cooling of a High-Power Overclocked CPU for Efficient Thermal Management" is published by researchers at Georgia Tech and Microsoft. According to the abstract: "In this work, we use micropin-fins etched directly on the back of an Intel Core i7-8700K CPU and overclocked it to dissipate up to 215W of power while being cooled by room... » read more

Thermal Management Implications For Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging


As the semiconductor industry reaches lower process nodes, silicon designers struggle to have Moore's Law produce the results achieved in earlier generations. Increasing the die size in a monolithic system on chip (SoC) designs is no longer economically viable. The breakdown of monolithic SoCs into specialized chips, referred to as chiplets, presents significant benefits in terms of cost, yield... » read more

Thermal Challenges And Moore’s Law


Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, looks at the evolution of graphics cards over a couple of decades and how designs changed to deal with more graphics and more heat, and why smaller, faster and cheaper doesn’t apply in this market. » read more