Engineers at Purdue University have developed a "micropump" cooling device that fits on a computer chip and circulates coolant through channels etched into the chip.

Innovative cooling systems will be needed for future computer chips that will generate more heat than current technology, says Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Purdue's Cooling Technologies Research Center. A decade from now, chips will likely contain upward of 100 times more transistors and other devices than the chips currently in use, Garimella says.

The new device has been integrated onto a silicon chip that is about 1 cm square. Garimella, doctoral student Brian D. Iverson and former doctoral student Vishal Singhal published an article about the device in the May issue of Electronics Cooling magazine.

"Our goal is to develop advanced cooling systems that are self-contained on chips and are capable of handling the more extreme heating in future chips," says Garimella.

The prototype chip contains numerous water-filled microchannels -- grooves about 100 microns wide, or about the width of a human hair. The channels are covered with a series of hundreds of electrodes, which receive varying voltage pulses in such a way that a traveling electric field is created in each channel. The traveling field creates ions, or electrically charged atoms and molecules, which are dragged along by the moving field.