CPU Cooling With Micro-Pumps

You do not have to be into water cooling to appreciate this story about two engineers that are developing a micro-pump to cool future processors. Imagine how cool, pun intended, it would be to have a water cooling system built right into the top of your processor instead of water blocks, a radiator, 300gph pump and ½” tubing everywhere.

The prototype chip contains numerous water-filled micro-channels, grooves about 100 microns wide, or about the width of a human hair. The channels are covered with a series of hundreds of electrodes, electronic devices that receive varying voltage pulses in such a way that a traveling electric field is created in each channel. The traveling field creates ions, or electrically charged atoms and molecules, which are dragged along by the moving field.