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Written by Wesley Akkerman on
When you talk about computers and other electronic devices, you are talking about the heatsink (also called heatsink in good Dutch). This part dissipates the heat produced by the various components. This is positive of course, but these heatsinks take up a lot of space. Isn’t that possible?
This article originally appeared on Computer Total.
This is probably the question that a group of scientists asked themselves. Therefore explore that scientists are using a new way to cool parts, without taking up a lot of space on metal blocks. For example, they now want the internal parts of a computer or smartphone coated with a layer of polysilicon and copper. What is the effect exactly?
The ordinary heatsink uses copper and aluminum, as these two metals act as conductors of heat. The scientists, who work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California, build on this science by providing parts with an adjacent protective layer of copper and an electrically insulating layer of polysilicon. The copper layer is then on the outside, and the polysilicon is between the copper and the part.
Scientists claim that this way you can get “comparable or even better performance” from the devices, compared to the traditional heatsink. And because computer makers don’t have to set aside space for large metal parts, that space can be used for other things. It is then possible to use more printed circuit boards in the same volume, so that the performance – in theory – increases even further.
Whether this will herald the end of the normal heatsink, we don’t know yet. It is still too early to draw an unequivocal conclusion. Scientists want to test the new cooling method on power modules and graphics cards first, so we have to patiently wait for the exact results for consumer electronics.
If the coating works exactly the way scientists think, computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets might look slightly different in the future or offer more speed and power in the same package. The big question is what happens when the copper layer rusts, for example – that would immediately be game over for the device in question. It’s also debatable whether the diaper is actually able to keep an entire computer cool, instead of just the parts the diaper is coated on.
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