Ventiva shows off tech to keep chips and devices cool

[Jay Goldberg]

In context: We've noticed a burning sensation in our pockets lately. Not the bite of inflation, but an actual heat source coming from our phones. Maybe it is 5G, maybe it is a design decision made by Apple, or by TSMC, whatever the reason, our smartphone runs hot.

Often, just a little bit of usage pushes our phones into cool-down mode, dimming the screen and slowing the device. Judging from online searches, many of you have probably noticed this as well. We tend to spend a lot of time and attention to the fans in laptop computers, and for example, how Apple's M-series processors are so efficient that the Air models do not need to use fans. Heat is a real issue, just one that we have resigned ourselves to coping with rather than solving.

As much as chip and device makers contort themselves to mitigate these heat issues, at heart the reality is that cooling technology has not changed in 40+ years. The industry has fans, heatsinks and if you want to go all-out, liquid cooling. There has not been anything new here in a very long time. Until now.

Editor's Note:
Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries.

Ventiva is a privately-held company based in Silicon Valley, and is a leader in a crop of companies introducing a new way to cool devices. Ventiva has developed a technology they call an Ionic Cooling Engine (ICE). This device creates a small, very power efficient electrical current, that stimulates air flow across it. Put simply, this is a fan with no moving parts.

The appeal of Ventiva's approach with ICE is that it can be made very small. Small enough to fit into all our gadgets. It is quiet, uses very little power and can be manufactured into pretty much any device, but is still capable of moving heat away from the toasty bits of the device.

The appeal of this is straightforward. Device makers can remove many of the bulky, heavy components they use today. This allows them to shrink devices, or save power, or turn up compute. It can also be used in devices like phones which could never fit a massive heatsink or a very breakable fan. We know some handset makers have been experimenting with liquid cooling in phones, an approach which just opens up all kinds of ugly scenarios.

At one level this seems fairly prosaic, but remember we have not really had any advances in cooling for a very long time. We think that makes this a fairly remarkable achievement. Sometimes the most important advances come from unexpected directions, and Ventiva may be capable of offering one such advance.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/102224-ventiva-shows-off-tech-keep-chips-devices-cool.html

 

[acoustis]

How exactly does this work? I mean, heat in our pockets is still heat in our pockets. As long as it is generated by electronics, no matter how cool those are, that heat has to leave the little devices and ends up in our pockets, so to speak.
I am always so amazed by the craze about power efficiency of every new iteration of a chip... sure thing, but why do they produce more heat in the first place if they are less power consummatory?

 

[erickmendes]

How exactly does this work? I mean, heat in our pockets is still heat in our pockets. As long as it is generated by electronics, no matter how cool those are, that heat has to leave the little devices and ends up in our pockets, so to speak.
I am always so amazed by the craze about power efficiency of every new iteration of a chip... sure thing, but why do they produce more heat in the first place if they are less power consummatory?

Because they make next gen chip that uses half the power for the same performance, OR double the performance for the same power...
They choose to sell skus that doubles performance over last gen to dominate the performance war, while using the same power (or close too). So most of the time the heat output don't change or get a little (or sometimes a lot) higher...

Take CPU/GPU... They could make RTX 4000 more cool, but that would make it's performance delta over RTX3000 lower, making RTX4000 less compeling also make it closer to RX7000 performance... That would make RTX4000 cheaper.

Intel 14900k sucks lots of power and gives lots of heat to make it win the performance crown over AMD... While AMD overall matches game performance but stays somewhat close on other scenarios... Even AMD 7000 series choose to fry itself to squeeze more performance, still using less power compared to Intel, but at higher heat output compared to AMD 5000 series.

They could choose to make these CPUs/GPUs run cooler at the cost of max performance but then the generational performance uplift would be smaller and that would make it harder for them to justify a higher selling price.

 

[opckieran]

What? No cooling advances for a very long time? What about the Frore Airjet?

 

[madboyv1]

Please correct me if I am mistaken, but if you are using airflow to cool electronic parts would you not need some sort of active convective cycle to make the best of it? Having an IP67+ device kind of restricts that kind of penetration to practically nil, so if you don't have some way to expel the hotter air and replace it with cooler air, you're at best internally spreading the heat across the entire device while still relying on the shell to continue sinking the heat out to atmosphere, which with some kind of heat spreader most devices already do.

I understand the concept regarding other devices like laptops and tablets, just as I find the Frore Airjet interesting in the same regard, but in as mobile phone solution (as the article suggests or hints at several times), I am not so sure.

 

[Watzupken]

If this is a fan, how do you cool with no vents? If it’s about spreading heat, just have a vapour chamber solution in there. I am pretty sure even having a vapour chamber is cheaper than this, less chance of failure and don’t use any power. I feel the reason why there’s been “no breakthrough” in cooling solution is mainly because of the cost.