Beat the heat in 3-D chip stacks with ICECool

In the Moore’s Law race to keep improving computer performance, the IT industry has turned upward, stacking chips like nano-sized 3-D skyscrapers. But those stacks, like the law it’s challenging, have their limits, due to overheating. So, our team in New York, alongside colleagues in Zurich, received a 2013 contract to tackle intra-chip cooling from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its ICECool program. For our part, we developed a new cooling technology to overcome the thermal barrier of stacking chips, an on-chip solution that could help to even cool off entire datacenters.