The future of powerful computing may be all wet. That’s the outlook as IBM and the Fraunhofer Institute on Thursday demonstrated a 3-D stack of computer chips cooled by water. The concept means the industry may continue to innovate well into the future.

In conventional computing, chips and memory are placed in rows. But designers have known that placing them in 3-D stacks accelerates computing because the distance that data needs to travel is reduced 1,000 times. It also allows 100 times more channels for information flow, but the problem has been heat. A 3-D stack can produce nearly 10 times more heat than side-by-side placement.

Going Inside

IBM’s solution is to pipe water between the 3-D layers through tubes as thin as a human hair. Water is much better at absorbing heat than conventional heatsinks and fans, and the water is well insulated from delicate components with silicon tubes that are sealed and double-layered. IBM said the design is “one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits.”

Water cooling has been used in supercomputers for years, with the water flowing past chips to keep them cool. The difference with IBM’s design is that the water now flows inside the microprocessor to remove heat.

“As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor’s capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don’t scale. In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3-D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling,” said Thomas Brunschwiler of IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory.