ELECTRONIC BLOOD

ANOTHER PROJECT coming out of IBM’s Zurich labs will be of interest to anyone who’s ever filled up a water-cooling reservoir and worried about spillage. Electronic blood is a fluid that circulates through the microchips themselves, drawing away heat, while at the same time providing power. In another example of hardware/wetware convergence, this is much the same way our brains work.

Using it means a change in the design of chips, so they contain microchannels that the “blood” can pass through to achieve laminar flow—an orderly, low-speed movement of the liquid in parallel layers, without any eddies or turbulence forming. It could change the underside of a chip, too—more of the 1,000-odd pins on the backside of a CPU are dedicated to power delivery than are for data flow. IBM is using 3D printing to produce its tiny cooling networks cheaply. Perhaps the biggest change this could bring to PCs, however, would be in density. At the moment, we need large surface areas for contact with heat spreaders or active coolers. With the cooling fluid moving across inner surfaces, we could stack chips like a five-patty burger, and let the sauce—or maybe the cheese— take care of heat and power. This would cut down on the amount of good fresh air inside our PC cases, as well as using only a single pump, reducing noise levels in the process.

The fluid itself is made from chemicals with names like dihydroxyanthraquinone, and by acting as an electrolyte, and being charged as it passes electrodes, it’s capable of supplying one watt of power, once pumping overheads are subtracted. This doesn’t sound much in these days of 1,000W PSUs, but it’s enough to power microprocessors, and the LEDs and lasers used in fiber-optic networks.