Take A Lab Tour Of This Solid-State Cooling Tech
hey internet you were super excited to see the airjet at CES the good news is we are here at four systems in San Jose California where Dr sachu Matt hathapati is going to give us a lab tour our pleasure Gordon welcome to floor systems I think probably what people of the internet want to know though is can we actually saw one of these open and look inside are you ready to do that yet not quite yet you know this is a new product we're just introducing into the market and we built this using a lot of proprietary design techniques and materials and so we're not quite ready to open the kimono yet okay but I can share with you a high level uh cross-section to give you an idea about how it works okay I think that's good because it's really good to to help me understand it because I what exactly is it doing sure well here's a little graphic GIF that gives you the idea you know it's a 2.8 millimeter thick a jet mini as well as Pro they're both 2.8 millimeters thick and that's conceptually what the cross section looks like and what it does you know you basically have uh two sections inside the top is a cavity with vibrating membranes in it and what it does is when the membranes are vibrating they pull F through the vents at the top and then that air is pushed down at the bottom of that cavity at very high velocities velocity is reaching up to 200 kilometers per hour or 120 miles an hour and those Jets of air they're pulsating Jets of air are impinging on the copper heat spreader at the bottom of their jet and that's where the heat extraction is happening so the the principle is that you would attach this copper heat spreader to the hot surface so the copper heat spreader gets as hot as the surface you're trying to cool and then when you turn the edge it on these membranes vibrate suck in air through the top the air that's pulled in is going through the cavity and hitting the copper heat spreader as pulsating Jets and using a principle called jet impingement we are able to extract heat with high efficiency from the copper heat spreader and then the hot air exits through a spout at the left and the air that is exiting is saturated with heat which means that the exit air temperature is the same as the temperature of the copper heat spreader so it's a highly efficient way of heating removing Heat and so we are able to maximize the amount of heat you can remove for the amount of air that is going through the chip one of the big questions that came out of the demos at CES was concerns about dust at CES you actually said though the air jet actually is better for dust control in devices how exactly does that work the way it works is you know you you have two ways it can work one you can put a dust guard on the inlet vents of the device so that any air that actually enters the device is already fitted for dust so dust doesn't enter the device at all and therefore the device entire device is dust proof okay an alternative way of handling it would be that you can actually put the dust guard directly as part of the airjet mini so you can actually place the dust guard directly on the airjet mini and if you did that then if air comes in then it is sucked into the air jet because of the high back pressure without any loss of flow into their jet okay so you know this membrane how are you able to because how are you able to get the air to pass through that is it similar to like Gore-Tex in a way with water yes it is you know this basically is dust proof and waterproof material so we've selected a specific material that actually filters out all dust that's less than one micron in diameter so micro dust can still go through but other than that all the dust is filtered out by this dust guard material and micro dust doesn't really impact the performance of The Edge itself just as air comes in gets saturated with heat and is ejected out that dust just passes through as well along with the air okay so anything there's more than one micron is filtered out is not entering the chip and anything that is smaller than a micron will just gets flushed out along with the air so and that's actually what we're going to see tested here we do extensive product and reliability testing in our Labs how all your manufacturing Fab is actually in Taiwan but the entire design of the product and also the life cycle testing in order to ensure that product is reliable is done here so you you're here in our r d product reliability testing lab and one of the tests we do is using dust and here's a chamber and you can see that you know we've got fine powder and a bunch of air jet Minis that are running and we have a fan that blows the air continuously and we run this non-stop for 10 days in a highly dust-filled chamber and we make sure that the at the end of the 10 days there's less than five percent degradation in performance of the airjet so we do extensive testing of All Sorts in order to make sure that the product is reliable and as a five year lifetime you know one of the misconceptions I think that was out there is that this this simply is a fan this is like a fancy way to make a fan you know is it a fan or is it not a fan it's definitely most definitely not a fan we are using solid state to move it but it is not just moving air it's actually using the air to remove heat so it's a self-contained heat removing active cooling chip sure it uses moving air but it uses the air most efficiently and the heat transfer is happening inside the chip itself not outside the chip so it's a air-based active cooling chip but it's it's a heat removing chip it's not a heat it's not a air moving chip right you wouldn't use this to blow into basically a that would be a waste of the capabilities of this chip I mean we are not trying to replace a ceiling fan we are trying to improve the thermal performance of computing devices so for that reason this is something that has been custom built for heat removal active heat removal unlike a fan which has been repurposed for removing heat in a Computing device which is not the original reason why fans were invented fans were invented to Glow air on a hot Summer's evening right and they've been repurposed for heat removal so we didn't have to do any of that we built this from scratch as an active heat removing chip so Sasha can you explain what this test is doing right now what you have here is called an htho chamber which is high temperature high humidity operation we put air Jets inside and we power them on and we leave them in there for 10 days Non-Stop and in those 10 days the temperature inside the chamber keeps cycling between 55 degrees C and negative 10 degrees C and the humidity is cycled between 95 percent relative humidity and zero so there's constant changes in temperature and humidity inside the chamber and that's happening non-stop for 10 days while the engine is running so this is called an accelerated lifetime test profile and we do that and make sure that once again before and after less than five percent degradation in the capability of their jet mini chip uh as a result of the accelerated life test and this is to simulate it working in a really a harsh environment I guess right not just that it's actually simulating a longer life so reliability is a very interesting science so they come up with these test criteria that give you very high confidence that if it has been able to perform in this type of situation for 10 days then that means that you will have several years of Lifetime normal operation so there are battery of tests like this one we do dust was one excellent lifetime testing is on one and then we also run a test flat out for two thousand hours non-stop to make sure that there's no degradation in performance so it's a combination of all these tests that we do that ensures that we are confident that the product we're shipping can work uh in in a product in a device for five years how can this be solid state if there's a moving membrane inside well you know I think that people misunderstand what solid state means solid state doesn't mean there's nothing moving it just means that it is about how you create that movement if you're using a electric motor to create the movement then it's not solid state if you're using materials that don't have moving Parts in them in order to create your the motion then it's solid state like for example if you have a sensor like an accelerometer or a gyroscope it's solid state but there is motion in it and as you as you know you know quartz clocks are solid state but they do have moving Parts in them so moving Parts doesn't mean it's not solid state it's about how you create that motion that determines whether something is solid state or not okay good good one because I I really that was what a lot of people really were were wondering but but that's semantics yeah it is semantics I have another question about the shape of this too because I notice at the end of it it actually necks down what's the reason for making it neck down at the end of it ah so so if you see the construction of the air jet you're absolutely right at the tip of this chip we have the spout which is the exit for the hot air and we want the hot air to exit fast and exit in a laminar fashion so that it is able to move out quickly and also as it comes out of the chip it entrains cool air which means that the hot air gets diffused uh into the ambient air very quickly so even though there's a lot of hot air coming out of this with very high temperature even if you put your finger a millimeter away you're not going to feel the heat Because by the time it has traveled that much distance it has already mixed with cooler so in order to make sure that we get the right um affect uh in terms of diffusion of the hot air into the ambient air we've designed this part in such a manner that you know it's narrow and so the air comes out fast uh there's also another reason obviously you know you want this exit to be as small as possible so that the exit went in the device that this goes into can be really small and most notebook manufacturers wouldn't want to have a a a gap in their form factor that is more than one millimeter in width so this meets that spec okay just makes it smaller and then also increases the velocity so then you have this entrainment of air okay so essentially what are we seeing on the screen here this is pretty cool this is a schlitter image of an airjet mini in action so what you see here is the LZ mini and as it cools the processor the air picks up heat and what's coming out is the exhaust air out of the airjet mini through the spout and as the air is coming out it's hot so it is at a different density compared to this air around it and so in a schlitter image you're able to use a light diffraction and you can actually dynamically capture the differences in air density so as a result you're able to see the hot air coming out of the airjet mini if I put a fan here what would I see you don't see anything because there is no difference in the temperature or the air density because fan itself is only an air moving device you can't capture air movement using schlieren unless there is a temperature difference so that I think actually comprehensively proves that aged is not just an air moving device it's a heat removal device it's an active heat removing chip that uses air so cool air goes into the chip and hot air comes out and what you're seeing here is the hot air coming out yeah and that to me that like a lot of the misconceptions I think of airjet you seemed like because people thought it was just a fancy fan but it isn't no no this is a complete heat removing active cooling chip it's a complete heat removing system in a chip where it just uses air no doubt so ambient cool air goes in and hot air comes out and the heat exchange is happening inside the chip to the air and the air that comes out is saturated with heat because if you recall we talked about jet impingement so that's a very efficient way of heat transfer so the air that's coming out is essentially at the same temperature as the processor or the copper heat spreader if you will at the bottom of the air jet chip and that's what you're seeing here and there's a couple principles there that uh you know I don't understand what does jet impingement means so Jade impingement is just a technique where if you have moving air moving air is very good at removing Heat from a hot surface but how well it removes Heat depends on how fast the air is moving if you keep increasing the speed of air then you will be able to remove more heat for the same volume of air as well if the air is directed vertically towards the hot surface it removes more heat than if it is just blowing over a hot surface so now you take those two principles together you create these Jets Affair which are traveling at you know as I said up to 200 kilometers per hour and those Jets of air are impinging on the hot surface perpendicularly okay then they are much more efficient at heat removal than air that is just blowing at a low velocity horizontally over a hot surface he says you so what's happening right here now well this is another of the reliability test we do on their jet this one's a long lifetime test now you've seen the high humidity high temperature chamber and you've seen the dust a third one is you know just running it flat out and you know in this test we run the air jet for 2000 hours continuously and that's about three months of continuous operation and we once again make sure that the performance of the chip has degraded if any less than five percent after the 2000 hour test and that has to be true of 100 of the devices and this these look like scales these aren't scales now these are hot plates so we are emulating the performance of The Edge yet inside a notebook for example by putting the edge yet on top of a hot plate and it's at 85c which is essentially what the die temperature would be typically and then we are running them at 100 operation and we do that non-stop for two thousand dollars you know essentially I do have one other business question and that is I've seen a lot of technologies that really are impressive and wow you that if they can't make business sense it's it's a it's a tough road you're going to be going up against fans that cost 50 cents 75 cents you know a dollar are you going to be able to really pit this product against those commodity parts that you can get every you can get really cheap I'm just wondering as a business sense they're not 50 cents but but it's a good question uh ultimately this is not a commodity this is a new Cutting Edge technology that we're just introducing into the market so off the bat it's certainly going to be a little bit more expensive I would say than a fan but not prohibitively so so we are working with the device manufacturers right now and it makes perfect sense the cost structure makes perfect sense for them to use it uh in in notebooks and also in all these other devices that I talked about are we as cheap as a fan no but uh is it priced that would be reasonable and acceptable by the device manufacturers the answer is an emphatic yes okay so we've seen the errors yet in a lot of other demos but it doesn't matter to you put in the laptop and you actually have a couple laptops to show off the air jets in action right so that's right tell me what's happening sure so here we have a 13 inch laptop ultra thin laptop and the one on the left is off the shelf and it has a fan in it when you run the cinebench on a steady state basis the CPU power that is supported by the fan and the thermal solution is 12 and a half watts of CPU power and that's the steady state performance we've been running cinebench in here for a while what we've done is taken the same laptop removed the fan and retrofitted it with three airjet mini inside the laptop and we are able to sustain 15 watts of power for the CPU so you're seeing a pretty decent bump up in performance and of course at the same time the one with the edge that is completely quiet and of course the fan makes noise the reason that we only were put put three engine mini in this is because when you're retrofitting the space that is available is not ideal for putting in Edge at mini so we could only squeeze in three even though there was plenty of space left over because it was just not the right shape for us to put a fourth Edge at mini but Apples to Apples if you actually utilize all the space that is taken up by the fan a fair comparison would be for mini because in the same space you can put the four mini and had we been able to put four mini we would have achieved 20 watts of CPU performance so 12 and a half to 20 noisy too quiet you know and I will say even this is is actually fairly quiet too right the fan I mean it is noisier because this feels completely silent but I kind of wonder if you go to a bigger laptop that is tuned to be higher performance right like you're absolutely right this particular laptop has chosen a lower RPM operation for the fan in order to keep it quiet so if you cranked up the fan to a higher RPM you could push the power for the CPU to 15 watts but it's going to be really noisy right right but you are going to be hard-pressed to get better than 15 in an ultra thin laptop 13 inch using fan whereas with 4 mini we can go to 20 and that's actually what you have in one of these laptops right that's right so here's another example of a laptop this is a 15 inch laptop and in this laptop we've been able to put in four Edge at Mini and you can see that with 4aged mini you are at 20 watts so if we were able to put 4 in there we would have gotten the 220 as well right so with four digit mini uh it is in steady state the CPU package power supported is 20 watts and that's that proves the point that we can get to 20 watts with 4AGE at mini and I think to me the besides the thermal uh messaging the difference is noise because I can hear this this laptop from a few feet away that's what we typically get in a lot of real it's still really thin but because the fan noise is what kind of drives people crazy sometimes that's correct that's correct so the whole point is we are saying you don't have to compromise on noise you don't have to compromise on thickness of the laptop but yet you can improve the performance this particular 15 inch laptop we put four Edge at mini to show 20 but you could also design a 15 inch laptop with three airjet Pro and if you had three Edge at Pro then you would get 28 watts in the same form factor with the fan it's at 17. so with the same space same X Y area you can put 300Z Pro and you can get to 28 so from 17 you're going to 28 and at the same time reducing eliminating the noise so that's that's the that's basically shows the advantage of the air jet and of course you can do that we're also making some a real key improvements to the industrial design you don't need to have vents at the bottom of the laptop anymore and also you can make the device dust proof and get the same performance and actually that's that's a really good point because I think that's this kind of makes a a good point here this is the same smaller level 13 inch laptop that's right laptop so this is the fan that goes into the touch and inch laptop that it currently ships with and what we've done is we've taken that out and replaced that with three airjet mini you can see the dust cards uh with three Edge at Mini and but you can see that the area that's taken up at the 300 mini is actually less than the fan area it's just a odd shaped fan so we couldn't put a fourth but in the same area X Y area you could actually put a fourth Edge at mini that's that's the that's the point I was trying to make but also with the fan you have all these holes at the bottom and this is the reason why dust goes in because of all these holes at the bottom what we do when you have an edge at mini system is you can completely block it with the over here so you can see it right so that's so it's completely blocked you block it for your demo there's no reason for us to have those anymore obviously you know if you're designing with airjet mini you would not make these holes because it's actually expensive to make this whole CNC is expensive so you don't need the holes but the what we did was because the holes were already there we just covered it with opaque material so that there's no air going in through those vents right and you know the interesting thing to me is like I don't almost every laptop I've seen has a fan vents on the bottom that's correct and the classic point is you you put on your shag carpet or your pillow a lot of people they put on their comforter and they're edited you that's a problem because you just blocked all those fan vents right that's correct actually I mean nowadays it's more important than ever that your laptop works well on a comforter and when you have Inlet vents at the bottom it's actually terrible idea to put it on a comforter because the inlet vents are at the bottom they get completely blocked and what happens when you put it on comforter is then the fan revs up in speed trying to compensate but still it can't so it keeps thrashing it gets faster louder but it doesn't really create any airflow because all the inlet vents are blocked and so then the whole notebook gets hotter so it's really counterintuitive but when you're in a comforter and you're in bed your laptop might become hotter and noisier and less performing it's a classic story right because a lot of people run into that problem but with airjet you you can suck air in the sides or that's correct so our design I mean guideline really is you know right here in the in the center at the back right here at the center of the back you would have the inlet rent if you're using airjet nothing at the bottom okay right here at the center of the back so the air goes in through that and uh and you also cover that went with the dust guard dust filter material so that even though there's actually a vent and air is going through the discrete vent at the back no dust is going in because you can cover the vent with dust proof filter material right the same material that I showed you that we put on the airjet itself you can also put on the inlet vent and again you couldn't do that you couldn't put the dust proof material in a laptop with a fan because not enough back pressure that's correct uh of course the the big question for a lot of people too is um when are we going to see this in a product as I told you at CES we are working with several device manufacturers as we speak designing this into their future devices and you'll see products coming out commercial products coming out into the market later this year um but I can't I can't you know jump the gun and make announcements before our customers are ready to do it sure uh and then I guess the natural part of the other part of that question is where else are we going to see this clearly we've seen a lot of demonstrations with PC laptops good place for it but this seems like you know we could go on to m.2 drives you can go into cameras you can get into gaming handheld set where else do you think we're going to see this we are seeing interest from several markets as we speak uh we started off with notebooks and I've seen the demos this one right here is The Notebook where we've got Fourier jet minis in it if you replace the if insta4age at mini you put in three air jet pro into this then you can get the CPU power up to 28 Watts those are the two popular configurations that we are currently working on Fourier jet meaning getting you to 20 watts of CPU power or 38 jet pro getting you to 28 watts of CPA power in a notebook so that's very popular but the same mini and pro can be used as you said in other devices handheld gaming um one aged Pro or two aged mini would do very well uh for a handheld gaming device we're also seeing interest from uh nvme M2 SSD manufacturers uh once you get to densities that are you know four or eight terabytes uh with the you know SSD controller and and a thunderbolt Port controller and so on so forth you're now hitting a thermal envelope that cannot be sustained in a small farm factor using only passive heat dissipation so they're showing a lot of interest in uh including their jet mini into those devices we also seeing a lot of interest from um uh camera manufacturers webcams small security cams and also um you know action cameras uh they're becoming very powerful in terms of the kind of video they can capture and the AI that they include and so their thermal envelopes are going beyond the amount of heat that can be dissipated in the small form factor that they have so adding an edge it would work very well for them and um you're making these yourself or are you fabulous we are actually an integrated design and manufacturing company so we Fab it ourselves and the reason for that you know this is built using unique design techniques unique materials and unique manufacturing processes so there isn't a Fab out there that knows how to do this we built this process technology ourselves and so we built the Fab that you know uh manifests so process technology ourselves so we have a Fab in Taiwan where we're fabbing it um but as we scale you know we absolutely do intend to have manufacturing partners that will help us to scale much faster than we can do ourselves another interesting segment we are seeing a lot of interest in is Mini PC you know there's no display right it's just a Mini PC and so you can connect a keyboard to it and connect a display to it and make it into a PC so the Mini PC market uh is pretty interesting because they want it to be really small like a hockey puck but at the same time have very high processing capability and but the account is all thermals and no one wants the Mini PC to be noisy so adding airjet in it is a perfect match so basically anywhere where there's a a really hot CPU GPU or sensor it feels like this is like a perfect application for it that's we think so we think so uh you know I mean as I said right now you know we are operating in the you know 10 to let's say 30 40 Watts as the overall processing power that we're able to support in this generation with airjet mini airjet pro this is scalable so you can put you know four Edge at Mini or two or three urgent pro and get to supporting that type of CPU power but some of your gaming applications you need a lot more than that so we do intend to address that kind of performance requirement but in subsequent generation sub products we're not quite there yet but we hope to get there in the coming years okay because I mean that's obviously that people want to know can I call my video card or my desktop in this but we're not there that's getting too far down the road I guess yeah I mean we this is a first generation product we just introduced it and we are using techniques to build this that are semiconductor technology based we also use a lot of techniques from the display industry that we repurpose for this particular product so all of those bought well for us to be able to continue to innovate and improve performance year on year at a pretty significant clip we would like to you know bring the same uh you know expectation that you have in the in the semiconductor industry at large you know everybody expects things to improve 30 40 50 one year to the next we believe we can achieve the same but we're just beginning that Journey anyway thanks for having us down here showing us all this great stuff we really hope to see it in action soon and hopefully we'll see that on PC world's YouTube channel so come back to PC world's YouTube channel for more videos hopefully coming covering products from for our systems as well as other awesome things in the PC ecosystem foreign
2023-02-27 03:44
