Heat as limiting agent?

Quote :

In 1958 by Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit that won him a physic Nobel prize in 2000. By that time, germanium was used to create the first working circuit. Robert Noyce later, improves Kilby’s chip by using silicon as base instead of germanium. The result? A technological breakthrough where laid the foundation for current most developed microchips. Current days Processors, Graphic Processing Unit are all developed using the same material, the semiconductor, silicon. Silicon was so great acting as a semiconductor due to its property of staying as a semiconductor even being stressed under high temperate. It is easily available as well as comes in lower cost as it’s the second most abundant element, 27.5% on earth after oxygen.

However, due to the incredible advancement of digital technology, mainly in microchip’s processing power and speed. Massive amount of power are needed for current’s most advance microchip to operate at full capability. This would resulting a massive amount of heat being produced, approaching hundred of Celsius or more. Many chips were burnt due to this after heavy usage. This was then solved by using various heat dissipation methods which includes heatsink, heatpipes, liquid cooling and air cooling. Up until today, all of the processor requires a good cooling system. An Intel Core 2 Extreme requires a combination of heatsink, heatpipes and fans and even so, the idle temperate still remains around 60 Celsius. Undoubtedly without the cooling system, in a matter of minutes the heat produced by it will damage it permanently rendering itself useless.

A conventional silicon-based chip will still operate if the operating temperature is around 100. If hits more than 300 according to calculations, it would fail by then. Practically, a standard processor usually starts to fail when the temperate reaches more than 100. With the aid of cooling system, it should not be a problem but due to various research that is still pushing the processing capabilities to the limit, scientist started to notice that heat could proves to be an obstacle for achieving further and astronomical processing speed. A numbers of research has been initiated to countermeasure this issue which includes new cooling methods, alternative form of silicon and even search of new semiconducting material.

Current most effective, practical, value cooling method is known as the liquid cooling system where we used continuous flow of fluid on the surface of microchips to transfer away the heat produced by it. But it users risk of damaging their hardware due to leakage and requires frequent maintenance of refilling the liquid. Another new method and alternative of liquid cooling is liquid submersion cooling. Liquid submersion cooling involves the technique of submerging the whole motherboard into a reservoir of non-conducting liquid usually Fluorinert liquid. Nevertheless, care must be taken to avoid contact of the liquid with Power Supply Units and mechanical or optical drive as it would spoil them and due to the volatility of the Fluorinert liquid, specially made chassis are required which comes with a hefty price tag. A gallon of the Fluorinert liquid could cost up to thousand dollars which made this method unaffordable by majority even with its effectiveness in cooling. Some even suggested the usage of liquid nitrogen or dry ice as new cooling method as their freezing point is far below 0 Celsius. It’s a double edge sword whereby it could be extremely effective but the vapors produced by it could damage the system components. A well insulated case are needed which normally are costly as well.
So to come up with a practical, far more effective, value and requires lesser maintenance, scientist experimented a new method of cooling which called Ionic cooling. It utilizes the same method of the good old heatsink and fan with some additional component of course. They claimed that air cooling wasn’t effective enough is because the molecule that remains at the surface of the chips will retained there even if a direct blow of fan towards the chip. So to make the molecule to flow away and transfer heat, they created something called ionic wind, where they use the nature of negative and positive charge to move molecules away from the surface of the chip resulting a continuous smooth airflow. The result gives a 250% improvement over normal fan blown cooling. Nonetheless, the device is bulky and 10 times of shrinkage is required for it to be implemented.

Some even suggested a miniature refrigerator for cooling purposes. This could be done, but specially made micros-sized channels and diaphragms are required for it to operate which could be pricy and requires frequent refilling of refrigerant. It will be fragile and extreme care is needed to be taken.

Researchers of NASA have taken the step even further by suggesting another new form of silicon as semiconductor. They called it the Silicon Carbine (SiC) chips. This newly introduced chip has the ability to withstand up to 500 Celsius without changing form or degradation occurs and still operates flawlessly. This is a breakthrough where expensive and bulky cooling system might not be needed if it was implemented successfully in the future. However, the cost to produce it is still considerably high as production of SiC is complicated and involves radiation hardened method which is costly.

In Intel, research of replacement for silicon-based chips has been started as well. Where they are experimenting and utilizing optical technique as priority. They estimated that if this were to be success, the processing speed and transfer rate could be 10 times faster than current processor yet with no temperature issue as light travels at enormous speed.
The limit of silicon as semiconductor is approaching. The future of computer cooling is still unknown, a sudden breakthrough of science could occur at any time. Replacement of silicon seems to be possible as well. Even if no solution were to come up, the advancement of semiconducting chip will still continue and by the mean time, normal users like us can only stick to the ordinary bulky cooling system.

Who wrote this article? Its me
You can say that I got too much time to spend

It is a fascinating article, impressing readers, your are not only telling us the discover and the invention of cooling system from the ancient time into the modern liquid cooling system together with the brilliant invention of scientist in overcoming the temperature problems with the creation of SiC......
I guess it's no doubt but to say this is a nice post....
Thx for the sharing ....and keep it up

Wa mm tim le 033
Try changing the quoted text color
See above, can't even read sia lolz

I think now is perfectly fine....

Yea sure do
=)

By the way rage, what course are you studying now?

Er...chemistry