IBM has delivered the first working prototype of its water-cooled 3D chips. They announced the discovery about a year ago but this is the first prototype they ‘ve shown the public. The processors operate with multiple layers of circuits and components stacked on top of each other, allowing for a ‘3D ‘ design rather than laying all components side by side. From CRN:

“As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor ’s capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don ‘t scale,” said Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM ’s Zurich Research Laboratory, in a statement. “Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem.” Brunschwiler and other IBM researchers piped water into cooling structures as thin as a human hair (50 microns) between the individual chip layers to remove heat efficiently at the source. The 3-D chip stacks would have an aggregated heat dissipation of close to 1 kilowatt — 10 times greater than the heat generated by a hot plate — with an area of 4 square centimeters and a thickness of about 1 millimeter.

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