In the heat pipe method, heat from the chip converts a liquid -- methanol -- to vapour. The vapour releases the heat it is carrying in a chosen area, turns back to liquid, and returns to collect more heat. The "wick" used for the heat pipe is made of finely etched lines that are about as deep as fingerprints. The liquid is able to defy gravity -- much like a kerosene lamp wick -- as it flows between several locations and an arbitrary end point. "That is the uniqueness -- the ultra-fine etching," said Kevin Krewell, a senior editor at the Microprocessor Report. "Most of the heat pipes are tubes about the width of a piece of spaghetti or thicker." Typical laptops contain a heat sink -- a plate of metal across the bottom of the system -- that absorbs the heat from the circuits and yields it up to air blown through the space by a cooling fan. Rightley's method could also be used in desktop computers, which face similar cooling obstacles, according to the researcher and analysts. Designers could create more powerful systems in smaller packages by allowing them to stack chips one atop the next for greater computational capacity. Rightley said that people living in colder climates could buy systems designed to dump heat into well-placed vents that would act as hand warmers. The new technology is being licensed to a start-up. A Sandia representative declined to provide the name or any further information about the start-up. Analysts noted that it remains to be seen if these new heat pipes can be manufactured in high volume and low costs. The research, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Microelectronics Journal, is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Heat Removal by Thermal Integrated Circuits project -- a joint effort between Sandia and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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