Maxwell Labs, a MN based startup from the city of St. Paul, is at the forefront of a new, revolutionary technology called Photonic Cooling. Fickle’s novel approach applies laser light to actively cool computer chips. To do this, it achieves breathtaking levels of efficiency and has the capability to redefine what high-performance computing can be. Photonic Cooling tracks and cools hot spots on chips in real time using TIRP to maintain chip temperatures below 50 °C. This technique greatly improves the thermal handling of today’s processors.
Chips have historically faced serious risk of overheating. As they push towards these prohibitive temperatures, upwards of 80 percent of their transistors need to be left dormant at any given instant, the so-called “dark silicon” problem. Maxwell Labs’ Photonic Cooling is doing just that to solve this critical issue. It provides cooling abilities that are orders of magnitude beyond what is possible today. The company hopes to realize a future in which the performance of computing is dictated only by the efficiency of algorithms, instead of thermal limits.
Understanding Photonic Cooling
Photonic Cooling is based on the fundamental principle of anti-Stokes cooling. This approach had been originally illustrated in condensed matter all the way back in 1995. This technique basically reemits light at a higher energy level. It does a marvelous job of matching energy from incoming photons with phonon energy — the lattice vibration of the material itself. This process makes it possible to focus continuous cooling to the hottest hot spots that can hit up to 2000 watts/mm 2 .
Maxwell Labs purposely uses ytterbium-doped silica glass in its initial designs. It’s a significant breakthrough. The team is currently on the hunt for other dopants to improve performance even more. The possible uses for this tech are wide ranging, but one area in which they could be most impactful is high-performance computing and AI training clusters.
Photonic Cooling achieves these effects by greatly increasing cooling power densities by two orders of magnitude. This extension makes it possible for chips to run at far higher clocking frequencies than we can reach today. This offloading has the potential to create dramatic improvements in compute efficiency, especially in data-heavy environments.
The Impact on Energy Efficiency
Photonic Cooling has a captivating promise. Such an enormous potential for reduction in energy consumption for the next generation of chips would be significant. Newly released research confirms that this cutting-edge cooling approach can cut total energy consumption by over 50 percent. It is explicitly tailored for current generation chips. So there’s no question that future chip designs will be able to realize even greater energy savings. They will benefit from higher thermal management efficiency.
Moreover, unlike traditional cooling technologies, which consume energy, Photonic Cooling enables more than 60 percent energy recovery through thermophotovoltaics. It does do one thing that can really improve reliability—it does a better job of cooling chips than air-cooled systems. On top of that, it captures wasted energy and reprocesses it into usable energy.
Combined cooling efficiency improvements and energy recovery will substantially reduce data center expenses. These savings would do a world of good for the high-performance computing facilities that rely on chip performance and efficiency.
Future Applications and Potential
The ramifications of Photonic Cooling go way beyond increasing chip performance. The need for increased speed and efficiency in computing is at an all-time high, especially with the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning. This technology can be a key enabler for such transformative and innovative computing paradigms.
With the proper cooling of chips, researchers and engineers are able to create groundbreaking algorithms and applications. This breakthrough makes it possible for chips to run at much higher frequencies and breaks through the thermal barriers of the past. This has the potential to lead to important advances in big data analysis and computer simulations. It will likely transform advanced calculations that require huge amounts of computing power.
Maxwell Labs is trying to make sure that they’re right in the thick of this technological revolution. The startup is working on advanced, high performance and scalable Photonic Cooling systems. In fact, they want to completely change the game for how industries do chip design and thermal management.