Water On The Brain

IBM says that water cooling is the answer to an overheated brain.

IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory recently demonstrated 3D chip stacks that are cooled with water. The company expects to commercialize such stacks for its multicore servers as early as 2013.

IBM plans to stack memory chips between processor cores to multiply interconnections by 100 times while reducing their feature size tenfold. To cool the stack at a rate of 180W per layer, water flows down 50µ channels between the stacked chips.

"Electrical interconnects are in a wiring crisis. The wiring does not scale the way transistors do it because the wire width is shrinking while their length is not," said Thomas Brunschwiler, researcher, IBM Zurich. "Our solution is to go to 3D to stack multicore dice and have the interconnections go in between them vertically, which can decrease their length by up to 1,000 times," he added.

IBM's paper on the approach, "Forced convective interlayer cooling in vertically integrated packages," received a Best Paper award at the IEEE ITherm conference, held recently in Florida. This marked the third consecutive year that the IBM's Advanced Thermal Packaging team has won the awards. The Zurich group claimed to be fixated on water cooling because it is up to 4,000 times more effective than air in removing heat from electronics.

Water cooling the brain seems to work very well for humans too. Something to take note of in hot weather. Keep hydrated. Get your salt. And a wet wash cloth to the forehead is always nice.