on-chip TEC

[manveruppd]

Intel have been experimenting with on-chip TECs that they've integrated on the heatspreader. They're saying that, even with the TEC switched off, the chip runs cooler due to it having a higher conductivity than the thermal grease that would've been on top of the heatspreader. I'm not a scientist so don't understand all of what I read, but they seem to imply that they can combine this with air cooling to more efficiently cool 'hot-spots' in massive data centres. I don't understand if they mean using passive air cooling during idle times and powering up the TECs during load, or keeping the TECs on all the time. I hope this makes it onto home consumer chips as well, and that they make the TEC sturdy enough for us to be able to apply a hormal heatsink on top. Then the chips can be cooled passively during idle times and with the aid of the TEC at load.

I'm pasting the first paragraph of the article below. The full text is here.

Nature Nanotechnology
Published online: 25 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.417

On-chip cooling by superlattice-based thin-film thermoelectrics

Ihtesham Chowdhury1, Ravi Prasher1,2, Kelly Lofgreen1, Gregory Chrysler1,5, Sridhar Narasimhan1, Ravi Mahajan1, David Koester3, Randall Alley3 & Rama Venkatasubramanian4

Abstract

There is a significant need for site-specific and on-demand cooling in electronic1, 2, optoelectronic3 and bioanalytical4 devices, where cooling is currently achieved by the use of bulky and/or over-designed system-level solutions. Thermoelectric devices can address these limitations while also enabling energy-efficient solutions, and significant progress has been made in the development of nanostructured thermoelectric materials with enhanced figures-of-merit5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. However, fully functional practical thermoelectric coolers have not been made from these nanomaterials due to the enormous difficulties in integrating nanoscale materials into microscale devices and packaged macroscale systems. Here, we show the integration of thermoelectric coolers fabricated from nanostructured Bi2Te3-based thin-film superlattices into state-of-the-art electronic packages. We report cooling of as much as 15 °C at the targeted region on a silicon chip with a high (approx1,300 W cm-2) heat flux. This is the first demonstration of viable chip-scale refrigeration technology and has the potential to enable a wide range of currently thermally limited applications.