Heat-tolerent computers.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Skybuck Flying
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Skybuck Flying

Here is an idea for the future which could buy some time with increasing
computer performance:

Start designing entire computers which are very heat tolerent.

So illiminate all components which are low heat tolerent like plastics/pcb's
and such.

Replace everything with maybe metals or so which could be high heat
tolerent.

Then these systems could run up to maybe 100 degrees of heat maybe even
more.

These systems would then have to throttle down in the summer when it's hot.

But they could also throttle up in the winter when it's freezing cold.

And then these computers could function as a replacement for "home heating"
and at the same time give nice processing performance ! ;) =D

Bye,
Skybuck.
 
"Tim" wrote in message

Start? It's been done for years. Ruggedized computers designed to
operate in the "industrial" and "military" temperature ranges are
available off-the-shelf.

You won't like the cost. Using heat-resistant, long-life parts comes at
a significant price.
Click to expand...

"
And computers that operate over 100C are available, but even more spendy.
"

Lol, ok, I am going to give you a really cheap reply:

"Start designing heat-tolerent computers for consumers" ! ;) =D

So start designing "heat-tolerent-consumer-grade-computers" which john doe
can afford as well ! ;) =D

Bye,
Skybuck =D
 
Here is an idea for the future which could buy some time with increasing
computer performance:

Start designing entire computers which are very heat tolerent.
Click to expand...

The main reason why this hasn't been tried is because the
microprocessor itself is not very heat tolerant.

There are some very heat-tolerant semiconductor materials. The only
one I can think of offhand is silicon carbide. That is used in some
electronics for automobiles.

The trouble is that silicon carbide crystals have a great many
defects. So to get any yield at all, chips have to be very small.
Goodbye microprocessors. Hello small-scale integration. So back to
million-dollar mainframes with lots of tiny chips in them, and long
wires between parts... which, of course, limits speed.

Someday, perhaps what you propose will be possible, as techniques for
growing silicon carbide crystals improve. But not yet.

John Savard
 
Here we go:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/SiC/

a place to start learning about the exciting world of silicon carbide
heat-tolerant electronics.

Silicon carbide can work at up to 650 degrees C... but even silicon
can go to 350 degrees C.

But because silicon's performance degrades as temperatures go up,
running silicon hotter doesn't really help things...

John Savard
 
Packaging is a huge problem at high temperatures.  The differential
thermal expansion of silicon and FR4 causes a great deal of stress,
which is one of the three primary limitations on die size.  (The others
are yield and routability when there are too many I/Os per unit area.)
Click to expand...

Yield I can understand.

Why the differential thermal expansion of silicon and FR4 - which, I
see, is what printed circuit boards are made of - should matter,
however, puzzles me.

The silicon is mounted to a substrate in a package, the package is
plugged into a socket, the socket is on a PC board.

So the plastic of the socket, and then the plastic or ceramic chip
package, need to match the FR4.

The chip, meanwhile, is bonded to metal in order to carry heat away.
That metal plate can be put in the package in a way that allows for
differential expansion. The pins on the package are connected to the
pads on the chip by fine flexible wires.

So I would have thought that it's the immediate clash between silicon
and aluminum that matters.

John Savard
 
"Quadibloc" wrote in message

Here is an idea for the future which could buy some time with increasing
computer performance:

Start designing entire computers which are very heat tolerent.
Click to expand...

"
The main reason why this hasn't been tried is because the
microprocessor itself is not very heat tolerant.
"

I don't believe this.

I think I have seen pentium III chips run at close to 100 degrees celcius
maybe even over up to 110 degrees celcius.

Perhaps you thought I ment farhenheit ?

Bye,
Skybuck.
 
On 08/15/2011 05:04 PM, Quadibloc wrote:

"Plugged" is so 1980.  A whole lot of them are big LGAs.  The CTE
mismatch can rip the corner pads off, or crack the solder balls.
Click to expand...

I'll admit I'm thinking of a consumer product desktop computer, as
opposed to either a blade in a rack or a tablet. And you should know
lots more about this kind of stuff than I do, of course.

I did some searching on this topic - besides finding out what FR4
_was_, I found out that silicon's expansion coefficient is quite
different from that of just about all the other materials used with
it.

But I would assume that if one is running a chip at a very high power
level, so that it is getting hot, one is talking about something like
a multi-chip module (MCM) or a chip in a socket with a big heatsink
and fan on top of it. Not a compact package bonded right on the PCB.

Thus, when a desktop machine is overclocked, the chip's clock rate and
power consumption both increase. The suggestion of the OP was, as I
understood it, that if the chip could still function at higher
temperatures, chips could be overclocked more, and perhaps with less
elaborate cooling.

Less elaborate cooling could go all the way down to the iPad level,
but one really doesn't want an iPad with a chip running at 500 degrees
Celsius.

For one thing, the chip couldn't be isolated from the surface of the
device well enough. You could burn yourself on something like that.
And then there's battery life.

John Savard
 
I worked a few years in the packaging department at IBM Research. (It
was a great place actually--that's where I made the infrared antenna
coupled tunnel junction detectors.) Even though I'm not a packaging
guy, I palled around with them and did some consulting for them, and in
the process learned a lot about this stuff.

The man-years of wasted effort that ROHS caused was criminally
irresponsible.
Click to expand...

Was this the fab that IBM had trouble getting useful JJs out of after
a shut-down?
Cheers

Phil Hobbs
Click to expand...


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
So, Yet Another Skyfuck Careening computer build bit the dust, eh?

Jeeze, dude. Just buy a freakin' Dell and give up trying to build
anything...and I mean ANYTHING...
 
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