By Amber Hickman |
Microsoft has successfully developed an in-chip microfluidic cooling system that can remove heat up to three times better than current cold plate technology.
The new cooling system uses microfluidics, an approach that brings liquid coolant directly inside the silicon. Tiny channels are etched directly on the back of the silicon chip, creating grooves that allow cooling liquid to directly flow on the chip.
Microsoft tested the system on a server running core services for a simulated Teams meeting.
“Microfluidics would allow for more power-dense designs that will enable more features that customers care about and give better performance in a smaller amount of space,” said Judy Priest, corporate vice president and chief technical officer of Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft.
During the prototyping stage, Microsoft partnered with Swiss startup Corintis to use AI to help optimise a bio-inspired design to cool chips’ hot spots efficiently. The design resembles the veins in a leaf to distribute the cooling liquid efficiently.
Microsoft plans to spend over $30 billion on capital expenditures this quarter to drive innovation in AI services and capabilities. These investments include developing its own family of Cobalt and Maia chips designed specifically to run Microsoft and customer workloads more efficiently.
“Hardware is the foundation of our services,” said Jim Kleewein, technical fellow at Microsoft 365 Core Management. “We all have a vested interest in that foundation – how reliable it is, how cost effective, how fast, how consistent the behaviour we can get from it, and how sustainable, to name just a few. Microfluidics improves each of those: cost, reliability, speed, consistency of behaviour, sustainability.”