Microsoft Is Investigating Adding Tiny Channels To CPUs For Cooling Via Microfluidics

Die Cooling Made Even More Direct?

Microsoft, that company which is not exactly famous for designing the most popular CPUs on the planet, thinks they’ve come up with something cool.  They envision etching tiny channels into the silicon on the back of processors through which water can run. The grooves would be about as thick as a human hair and laid out in a pattern that “resembles the veins in a leaf or a butterfly wing”.  The name for this sort of design is microfluidics and it has been used in numerous applications, up to and including your water block.  

The idea is interesting but comes with some serious concerns, the most obvious of which is that you don’t want any conductive fluids touching your silicon directly.  There is also a structural concern, our chips are already fragile and etching out more material will make them even more delicate.  Microsoft claims that tests of a GPU with their microfluidics design reduced the maximum temperature raise by 65%.  They didn’t provide details on exactly what that means, nor did they mention what fluid was flowing through the channels.

It sounds like an interesting idea to control the heat in tiny, power hungry chips but also seems very dangerous and likely rather expensive to implement.