In collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico, the startup Maxwell Labs is testing a new method for cooling computer chips. The goal is to significantly reduce energy consumption in data centers using photonics-based cooling technology. The concept is based on using lasers to precisely cool localized hotspots on semiconductor components.
“About 30 to 40 percent of the energy data centers use is spent on cooling,” said Raktim Sarma, the lead Sandia physicist on the project. He added that in some communities, the amount of water needed can strain local resources.
Maxwell Labs is therefore pursuing a photonic approach, utilizing laser light in a specially designed “cold photon plate.” This plate is primarily made of gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material with suitable optical properties. The light is focused onto hotspots just a few hundred micrometers in size—roughly the diameter of a grain of dust.
“A successful project will not only address the immediate need for energy savings but also pave the way for processors to operate at performance levels that were previously thought impossible,” Maxwell Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer Mike Karpe said.
The ultra-pure epitaxial layers of gallium arsenide required for this application are produced at Sandia using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). This technique allows the deposition of material layers with atomic precision under ultra-high vacuum.
“The unique capability of light to target and control localized heating spatially and at optical timescales for these devices unlocks thermal design constraints that are so fundamental to chip design that it is hard to speculate what chip architects will do with it — but I trust that it will fundamentally change the types of problems we can solve with computers,” Maxwell CEO Jacob Balma said.
“It became clear to me from this collaboration that Dr. Sarma and Sandia Labs are among only a handful of partners that carry the vision, appetite and technical capabilities to address the highly interdisciplinary and pioneering materials, electronics and photonic components of this project,” Maxwell’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Alejandro Rodriguez, said.
“With MBE, we use ultrahigh purity sources, we can control the thickness of materials with a precision of less than one atomic layer and we grow the layers under ultrahigh vacuum,” Sadhvikas said.
Initial simulations show that chips can be kept cooler with this new method than with water-based cooling systems. This could enhance the performance capabilities of future processor architectures while reducing the thermal limitations in chip design.
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