Transistor-integrated cooling for a more powerful chip

© 2020 EPFL Researchers have created a single chip that combines a transistor and micro-fluidic cooling system. Managing the heat generated in electronics is a huge problem, especially with the constant push to reduce the size and pack as many transistors as possible in the same chip. The whole problem is how to manage such high heat fluxes efficiently. Usually electronic technologies, designed by electrical engineers, and cooling systems, designed by mechanical engineers, are done independently and separately. But now EPFL researchers have quietly revolutionized the process by combining these two design steps into one: they-ve developed an integrated microfluidic cooling technology together with the electronics, that can efficiently manage the large heat fluxes generated by transistors. Their research with several high-voltage devices, into a single chip . The best of both worlds In this project, Professor Elison Matioli, his doctoral candidate Remco Van Erp, and their team from the School of Engineering's Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERLAB), began working to bring about a real change in mentality when it comes to designing electronic devices, by conceiving the electronics and cooling together, right from the beginning, aiming to extract the heat very near the regions that heat up the most in the device.