Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by KickAssClown

I wonder if you could integrate this improvement with the 500ghz SiGe HBT Chips. I would love to see relatively cheap consumer grade chips running at 100+ ghz speeds with little or no heat problems.

The article mentions integrating these small, moving part-free air blowers into chips. However, they’re still air blowers, constrained by the low heat capacity of air vs. liquid and solid-state cooling, so I suspect that liquid cooling and Peltier devices will remain the technology of choice for the highest heat producing microelectronics. In short, a smaller, better “fan” is an incremental improvement that may make some dramatic advances in everyday devices (for example, the idea of a miniature blown air cooler in a handheld brings a smile to my face and a gleam to my eyes when I think of it while waiting … and waiting … for the next page of a PDF file to render on my present-day Palm TX handheld ), but won’t, I think, do much for high-end computer design

Concerning silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs): I’ve read, in articles like this 6/21/2006 one, about them being used for analog devices – primarily very-high frequency signal amplification – but not for very high clock speed CPUs or other digital chips. KAC, have you heard of such devices? They sound interesting, but I’m unsure if any actually exist.

When it comes to the ultimate solution to thermal limitation on digital computing, I think Landauer and others were on the right track with the idea of “reversible computing”, which allows, in principle, tremendous switch change rates with no waste heat. If you can bear with the ugliness of a PPT file, 10/30/2006 one by Mike Frank is, IMHO, one of the best introductions to the idea.