Ionic Breeze Computer Cooling Technology

We may be up to over 3 Gigahertz computers today but in 2000, there was a "heat barrier" that caused the delay of the release of the new chips. A new material solved that problem allowing computer scientists to advance. Computers overheating has not exactly been a new problem and the more powerful computers such as the Cray-2 supercomputer is liquid cooled, causing people to nickname the machine "bubbles." Jokesters have often put up "no fishing signs" and made Loch Ness monster jokes where these systems can be found.

The average user however has little to no need for the power of a Cray super computer, but even so, the smaller devices tend to generate an increasing amount of heat. A company in the United Sates has developed a new way of cooling processes that involves an ionic "breeze" technology. Todays devices are loaded with transistors and the more computing power available to the user, the more heat that gets generated by the device. The traditional method involves the hotter molecules over the chips to be stuck there.

Computers have used fans since the early days of the 8086 microprocessors. While the strategy has been effective, problems can arise by the way air flows over the chips. The new device however moves particles from one end of the device to the other in addition to having the more conventional fan blow over top of the microprocessor. When electricity gets applied to the new device, the particles get charged moving them towards the negatively charged end, causing better circulation. Then fans still employed can then move the hot air pockets away from the microchips. In tests using the new technology, there was a 250% cooling improvement over just a fan alone. News of tests of the new technology appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics.

It may yet be awhile before consumers see these devices installed in their computers. The device is still a little too large to be effective for that purpose. If the researchers can succeed in making the device small enough to fit in desktops, it will likely soon see practical applications. Lapotop users may still have to wait a little while longer. Even at a few millimeters, it is still too large for most of the chips in integrated circuit boards. If there are successful in their miniaturization efforts it would open up a new era of faster computing power as did the new Pentium chips released early in this decade.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6946042.stm