What is Active Microchannel Cooling, and why has it caught our attention so quickly?

The photo shows the microchannel heat collector (yellow square) attached to a mounting plate for what appears to be Pentium 4 socket 478 heatsink retention frame (blue), that in tern attaches to the CPU. Fluid flows through the collector, back to a radiator that transfers heat to the air, then into a pump located below the radiator. The pump moves the fluid back through the microchannel heat collector, completing the sealed loop.

Well, Active Microchannel Cooling describes a self-contained cooling system centered around a micro-machined silicon heat collector that is fabricated much in the same way as the CPUs it is designed to cool. This isn't a silicon CPU core with heat radiating fins however.

What Cooligy have done is use standard silicon etching techniques to create a textured surface that is ideal for watercooling, albeit on a micro-scale.

Cooligy's silicon heat collector has a dense array of microchannels etched into the surface that work to transfer heat energy to a fluid which is circulated through the entire package. That heat energy is then pumped to a nearby radiator where it can be dispersed into the surrounding atmosphere with the aid of a fan, or through passive convection cooling.

If your thinking "well, that sounds just like the watercooling we've been doing for years" you're partially correct, but there are a few noticeable differences between the set up Cooligy have developed, and the enthusiasts choice of waterblock, pump and radiator. The Cooligy system uses a fully self contained fluid cycle, meaning that the liquid used to keep the silicon heat collector with all its microchannels cool, can never evaporate.

The company will begin supplying qualification systems to computer systems developers and manufacturers later this year. Prices are rumored to be around the $30 range for a system capable of cooling a 1U server or workstation processor according.