IBM moots research for 'cooling' chips

Berdonz spoke to R Jai Krishna from CyberMedia News about the new research on microelectronics undertaken by IBM, during his short visit to India. Excerpts:

Could you give a brief on IBM’s research in microelectronics and chip technology?

An important focus at IBM Research and in particular also of the Science and Technology department at ZRL is chip technology. Spurred by the demand for more powerful, yet energy-efficient chips, this is a key research area as current technologies are approaching their limits. We are researching on replacing chips with new materials, especially with the help of microelectronics’ thus enhancing the computing performance, by cooling the chips faster, and invariably reducing energy costs.

What has necessitated such a research?

The driving demand for more computing power especially in areas of simulation by complex micro and macroscopic systems from biology, medicine to meteorology and astronomy; the second area is in mobile applications, where mobile has evolved as a device, which can do everything today. The third area is real-time gaming and complex 3-D imaging.



On one hand that means enhancing current silicon-based chip technology, so called CMOS technology, in order to increase chip performance according to Moore's Law and the industry roadmap. ZRL researchers are looking here in particular into introducing new materials with better characteristics for critical parts in the functional building blocks (transistors) on the chip in order to allow further miniaturization.

On the other hand, as a more long-term effort, researchers are looking beyond CMOS and are investigating whole new approaches and technologies that could eventually replace CMOS, once the ultimate limits of that technology are reached (approx. 15-20 years).

These new, so called post-CMOS technologies are all to be found in nanotechnology and IBM researchers are looking into four different candidates. The first one is the Carbon nanotubes, second is Silicon nanowires, where major research projects are already on ZRL). We are also working on molecular electronics (using molecules for information processing), and fourth and the last area is in Spintronics (using the magnetic direction of an electron for information processing) (some research done at ZRL)

ZRL is pursuing work in the silicon nanowires, molecular electronics and spintronics. One recent result was the first single molecule switch and memory element.

What computing challenge does the new research tend to address?

The major challenge is the chip cooling, because chips get ever more powerful by ever more functional devices on the same area, the cooling needs to be more powerful and more local. Looking at spiralling cooling costs in data centres, where energy costs for cooling are becoming as high as the cost for operating the chip itself. There is also a need for more energy-efficient cooling.

Current cooling technologies, mainly based on air-cooling, are reaching their limits with products sold. For critical applications, such as gaming, where high-performance chips are needed, industry moves to multi-core architectures (having not one processor, but multiple ones) to circumvent the cooling problem.

ZRL researchers very recently announced two new cooling and chip packaging technologies combining sophisticated micro-technology and biological concepts to tackle the challenge and achieve both: powerful cooling right where the cooling is needed with less energy, thereby paving the way for cooling next-generation chips.

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