Oh sure,
liquid cooling rigs are all the rage, but they aren't too useful within minuscule things like netbooks, MIDs and pocket projectors. The always churning minds over at
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are already on the issue, recently conjuring up a new material designed to "efficiently dissipate heat even in devices with densely packed components and that can give increasingly miniaturized electronics a longer life." Researchers at the entity's Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research have teamed with gurus from Siemens and Plansee to create the substance as part of the EU project "ExtreMat." Unfortunately, details beyond that are few and far between, but given that demonstrations have reportedly "already been produced," we'd say it's well on its way to infiltrating things far smaller than your mind can grasp.
posted Apr 9th 2009 3:17AM
One step closer to a screaming fast passively cooled rig. Cool!!!
The question is, how much will this fuck someone up, if say you made them do it via peer pressure / for shits and giggles?
Made me think the next cool gadget was a rock.
sooo 100um pellets? Are they going to be suspended in a liquid, mixed in with copper, or what?
I'm guessing they will mix it with the moon rock pictured in the post. (joking)
They will probably blend it in with the metal they use in the circuit's and stuff inside.
But it won't actually make anything run cooler. It'll just makes parts of your electronics move around heat faster, potential turning that lap-warming, desktop-replacement into a real nut-cooker.
Maybe they can make these heat sinks in the shape of cool branding marks, so you can at least your 1st degree burns leave cool scars?
Do you really want to have to explain that Apple logo on your family jewels?
"The New iKnob"
Problem is... Apple products tend to get smaller ;)
Or we could just use aerogel.
aerogel is a lighter than air substance that would not work well to dissipate heat.
Aerogel is good as an insulator - very good, in fact - but not for thermal transfer - actually coolth but that's a whole nuther story!
Aerogel has some other really great properties in relation to sound diffusion - which can be used to create really secure rooms - but, that too, is nuther story.
As for this "new" material - Darwin is spot on - and even more profound results are being realised from the use of C70 and graphine. Great thermal transfer. C70 can be used for "in chip" dissipation.
The key is not to just get rid of the heat but also convert some of it back to electricity using the Seebeck effect. Then you are on to something!
Cheers
or diamond dust
The summary was even more poorly written than the actual article itself, which is typical for many similar articles in this field with 90% introductory nonsense and 10% information.
As Soopergooman points out, they use diamond dust. That's nothing new, as diamond dust has better thermal conduction characteristics than even copper. What's new is that they were able to mix the dust into copper AND HAVE IT BOND by using a tiny amount of chromium. The result is a metal-matrix composite that has thermal expansion characteristics similar to silicon, which means you can bond a heatspreader directly to the chip and not have thermally-induced stresses crack it to shards.
Bonding direct to chip is old tech, but this composite moves heat off much faster, which is great. Still, that's not exactly how most people would understand a, "new cooling material."
+ 40% damage?
Thanks for your summary Darwin, appreciate it, nice and clear.
Hrm, if I could somehow incorporate this material into my Touch Pro, the overheating problems would be a thing of the past...
Am I the only one that read 'ExcreMent'?
Aerogel is the opposite of what you want. It would insulate your device, allow very little heat to escape, overheating your device as quickly as possible.
That should have been a reply to Jorge, oy.
Lisa... errrm Siemens, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
am i the only one that saw the picture and thought, adamantium?!