IBM has gone a long way in inventing new phenomenons. One more feather has been added to their cap when they found that we can cool chips using river water. IBM demonstrated a prototype that shows how rivers of water can cool computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other instead of the traditional method of having them sit side-by-side on silicon wafer.

Brunschwiler and other IBM researchers piped water into cooling structures as thin as a human hair (50 microns) between the individual chip layers to remove heat efficiently at the source. The 3-D chip stacks would have an aggregated heat dissipation of close to 1 kilowatt -- 10 times greater than the heat generated by a hot plate -- with an area of 4 square centimeters and a thickness of about 1 millimeter.

The researchers said they were able to overcome technical challenges by designing a system that maximizes the water flow through the layers, and also hermetically sealed the interconnects to prevent water from causing electrical shorts. This seems to be a striking thing.