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Silent microchip 'fan' has no moving parts

By Robert Jaques
20 March 2008 07:13AM
Tags: silent | microchip | fan | moving | parts

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer..

The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size.

The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

RSD5 is the culmination of six years of research by Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies when they were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

"The RSD5 is one of the most significant advances in electronics cooling since heat pipes. It could change the cooling paradigm for mobile electronics," said Singhal.

He explained that RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity).

The wires lie within uncharged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shapes to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

"The technology is a breakthrough in the design and development of semiconductors as it brings an elegant and cost effective solution to the heating problems that have plagued the industry," said Juan Figueroa, the NSF officer who oversaw the research.

The technology has the power to cool a 25W chip with a device smaller than one cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips, according to the researchers.

Copyright © 2008 vnunet.com

   




Comments (12)

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"While this technology does well moving air to a higher velocity than traditional fans, what it lacks is being able to generate any kind of real pressure. Pressure is needed push air into and around things like the fins of a heat-sink (or worse a dust clogged one), or a wire-mesh filter, a finger guard. While this is a good step, until they can create one that generates air pressure, this technology will never be a replacement for traditional fans."

Posted by Brian Summers, 20/03/2008 1:25:15 PM

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"Did you look at the graph? It in fact generates plenty of pressure, more efficiently than any mechanical fan of equivalent size. There wouldn't seem to be anything in the design that precludes larger versions from being built, though I don't suspect it'll be replacing case fans in towers anytime soon.

I guess those Ionic Breeze gadgets were good for something after all.
"

Posted by Chuck Adams, 20/03/2008 3:10:46 PM

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"While I commend the scientific efforts, and think this is an excellent breakthrough, I have serious issues with their particular goal. The basic issue with plasma is that when you charge the atoms in the field, the resulting state of matter emits HUGE amounts of electromagnetic interference. "Corona wind" is similar in nature, if not exactly the same, to the solar wind phenomena that the sun puts out. Placing even a "micro" amount of plasma in such a close area to the transistors on a processor will surely cause all kinds of data corruption. I'm happy to see they're trying coming up with new solutions to the problem, but I for one will never put charged plasma inside my computers to cool them... unless of course we get to the light-based computing everyone keeps promising is coming. It might work then... but who knows? "

Posted by Matthew Smollinger, 20/03/2008 3:24:32 PM

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"Just for the record, they are not the first who encountered this effect. The effect has been used to create fake ufo's, it was even on mythbusters TV. Just telling this before they think it can be pattented it's not their idea to change airflow by use of high voltage. Nor it is the idea to cool something with air.

....The patent hater...
Without patents and can become cheap. anyway lets hope it's electromagnetic radiation doesnt interfere with the to be cooled chip
"

Posted by peter, 20/03/2008 8:12:37 PM

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"The EMI due to discharge won't affect the chip, or the transistors in any way. The effect is on the physical copper traces, not the silicon. Introducing noise on here will create jitter and other undesirables, but a good PCB design (already present in every motherboard I know of) includes a ground plane to.... reduce the effects of EMI. At worst they'll have to add a small amount of EMI protection on the high speed regions, at best it will have negligible effects on performance."

Posted by Daniel, 20/03/2008 10:35:27 PM

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"http://inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler2/Overview.aspx"

Posted by O Krantz, 20/03/2008 11:20:05 PM

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"http://inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler2/Overview.aspx"

Posted by O Krantz, 20/03/2008 11:20:11 PM

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"Good, Now they need to put them in
them damned leaf blowers so I dont kill someone.
"

Posted by Will, 21/03/2008 12:35:56 AM

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"I think this would be a great idea, especially since I have had problems with fans before. The only problem that I can see is the generation of Ozone gases, which is not good to breathe in at high amounts. This is basically the same way that the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze works, and the problem with those is the fact that it generates ozone gases. "

Posted by Makoto, 21/03/2008 2:15:26 AM

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"Not the fact that the mechanical fans listed here are in mm not cm. This are the tiny little fans like the ones you'd see on an old 486 chip, not the big 8 or 12 cm fans on today's desktop CPU coolers.

Also notice that when put under pressure (as other posted here) like when dust builds up etc, these solid state fans lose flow very quickly, stopping all together at 20 Pa where the mechanical ones would keep going at more than double that pressure. Add an ultra high speed mechanical fan that blows the dust out when the SS fan starts up and you might have something though. However, these will only be useful for laptops (possibly) but not likely for desktops.
"

Posted by Mike Innes, 21/03/2008 5:17:08 AM

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