The proliferation of digital cameras and their subsequent modular integration in mobile communication and hand-held devices has made today’s photography almost trivial. The latter, i.e., the integration in mobile and hand-held devices is largely made possible by advancements in imaging technology as well as miniaturizing optics and the requisite electronics. Most camera … [Read more...]
Back to the Future with a Liquid Cooled Supercomputer
Introduction: Evolution of Air and Water Cooling for Electronic Systems Since the development of the first electronic digital computers in the 1940s, efficient removal of heat has played a key role in insuring the reliable operation of successive generations of computers. In many instances the trend toward higher circuit packaging density to provide reductions in circuit delay … [Read more...]
Exploring the Limits of Air Cooling
Introduction Heat from electronic devices is an integral part of information processing, not a nuisance that can someday be eliminated. This is a physical principle that is independent of the device of information processing. However, when viewed in the historical perspective, the severity of heat problems has not monotonically increased. It came to the fore some time ago, … [Read more...]
Liquid Cooling is Back
Introduction IBM announced its return to water cooling on April 19, 2005 with the introduction of a water cooled heat exchanger mounted to the back cover of a 19 inch rack. This is the first of the major datacom equipment manufacturers to employ water cooling for a rack of CMOS processors, using a cooling distribution unit supplying the water and rejecting the heat load to … [Read more...]
The Challenge of Operating Computers at Ultra-low Temperatures
Although the potential for low temperature enhancement of CMOS circuit performance has been recognized for some time, circuit scaling (proportionally reducing the size of the circuit) has been the preferred method of achieving higher performance. But as minimum feature size passed well into the sub-micron and now into the nanometer region, this route to higher performance has … [Read more...]
