The heatsink when it returns? It could just be | background
Looking for an alternative
written by Wesley Ackerman on
When you talk about computers and other electronic devices, you are talking about a heatsink (also called a heat sink in good Dutch). This part dissipates the heat generated by the various components. This is positive, of course, but such heatsinks take up a lot of space. Isn’t that possible?
This article originally appeared on Computer Total.
Perhaps this is the question that a group of scientists asked themselves. And therefore Search Scientists are using a new method to cool the parts, without taking up much space on the metal blocks. For example, they now want the internal parts of the computer or smart phone Deformation with a layer of polysilicon and copper. What exactly is the effect?
An ordinary heatsink uses copper and aluminum, as these two metals act as heat conductors. The scientists, working at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California, are building on this science by providing the parts with an adjacent protective layer of copper and an electrically insulating layer of polysilicon. Then the copper layer is on the outside, and the polysilicon is located between the copper and the part.
Scientists claim that in this way you can get “similar or even better performance” from the devices, compared to a conventional heatsink. And because PC manufacturers don’t have to allocate 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 size, so that performance – in theory – increases even more.
Whether this will herald the end of the normal heatsink, we don’t know yet. It is still too early to reach an unambiguous conclusion. Scientists first want to test the new method of cooling on power units and graphics cards, so we’ll have to wait patiently for the exact results for regular consumer electronics.
If the coating works just as scientists think, computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets may look a little 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 the end of the workout for the device in question. It is also questionable whether the layer is actually able to keep an entire PC cool, rather than the portions over which the layer is smeared.
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