Ventiva says away with fans for thin and light laptops
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Ventiva says away with fans for thin and light laptops Startup Ventiva has invented a way of cooling semiconductor chips in edge systems that can’t support fans. Its technology can cool processor designs up to 40W thermal design power (TDP) while maintaining effective silence, which means it can cover almost the complete range of laptops for commercial and consumer customers. It uses so-called Ionic Cooling Engine (ICE) technology using the principle of electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow. Envisage two small electrodes, an emitter and a collector. A high voltage but very low current is applied to the emitter, creating a strong electric field. This strips electrons from molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and other trace elements in air, and creates positively-biased ions that are repelled from the positively charged emitter. A plasma field exists in the gap between the emitter and the collector and consists of an ionization zone and an ion drift zone. The ionization zone is very small, just a few microns in width, and is located next to the emitter. They move towards the grounded or low-voltage collector electrode, colliding with neutral air molecules in the drift zone, and causing them to move. The result is an avalanche of air molecules, in motion toward the collector. When this swarm of neutral and positively charged ions reach the collector, the positively charged ions pick-up electrons at the collector. These are the electrons that were stripped from the ions; they flow in the opposite direction of the current, through the power supply to the collector. This results in the outflow of primarily neutrally charged air molecules It is effectively silent, generating less than 15 dBA sound pressure. Ventiva adds a software-controlled power supply and calls this its ICE9 technology. It uses intelligent software control to continuously monitor its operation and can adaptively deliver more or less airflow as an electronic system requires. A designer connects existing fan control, with its pulse-width modulation (PWM) outputs to solid-state ICE9 devices which translate PWM outputs to the voltage and current levels needed to make the system move air faster or slower. The ICE9 can move hot air from a system’s PCBA through a heat pipe or vapour chamber to a finned heat sink thermal module, pass heat to air the other side of the exchanger and so to the outside. Unlike Frore’s air-jet technology which involves thin, slab-like devices attached to the surface of an SSD chip, Ventiva’s ICE9 technology is more of a system-level re-think of the laptop’s design. A laptop chassis will be fitted with a side-in and side-out airflow scheme. A thin and light laptop computer’s internal space is divided into a rectangular spaces; a cooling zone at the rear containing the ICE devices and a heat exchanger, a compute zone - its printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) with compute, DRAM and NAND chips, and the battery zone. System designers can avoid using fans and, Ventiva says, deliver up to 20 percent more space back to the motherboard. This allows space for full-length M.2 drives, including multiple 2280s. The battery can also be larger. Because Ventiva’s ICE9 devices is side-in and side-out, multiple units can be stacked or arranged in parallel, resulting in higher airflow. Different airflow pathways will be used to cool the system-on-chip compute components on the one hand, with a heat exchanger, and the keyboard, palm rest and bottom cover (“skin cooling”) on the other. Ventiva was formerly known as Thorn Micro Technologies and is a Purdue University spin-out co-founded by Vishal Singhal and CTO Daniel Schlitz around 2005. Both have since left. It is now run by chairman, president and CEO Carl Schachte. It is VC-backed, having raised around $80 million in funding. Notable investors include IAG Capital Partners, DCM Ventures, Foundation Capital, BRC Group Holdings, Renesas Electronics, MedTex Ventures, and others. It’s headquartered in Fremont, California, with facilities for R&D, prototyping, and testing, and has partnerships with firms like AMD, ASUS, Dell, and Intel for reference designs and explorations. Ventiva system targets include thin and light laptops, mini-PCs, edge devices, consumer electronics, AR/VR and data center servers. Learn more from a downloadable Ventiva whitepaper.
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