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Laser cooling breakthrough could make data centers much greener | While lasers are most often used to heat things up, they can also cool certain elements when precisely targeted at a tiny area
Lasers are great for heating things up, whether you need to do it quickly, hit a precise target, or do it from a distance. Under specific conditions, lasers can also cool things down, and that might be JUST what we need to tackle way-too-toasty data centers.
Data center chips are typically cooled using cold water that flows through microscopic channels in copper plates mounted on top of the processors. They intend to create a photonic cold plate with tiny features, about a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, to channel cooling lasers to target hotspots. “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 Labs CEO Jacob Balma explained.
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