Researchers may have found a way to chill your components without the use of these slotted hunks of metal that are used by default to keep components cool on your PC and practically every other electronic device. This is exciting news because heatsinks are the default when it comes to keeping components cool on your PC and practically every other electronic device. A new and more streamlined technique for cooling electronic devices is described in an article published on Science Daily (via Tom’s Hardware), which describes how the technique involves coating the entire device with poly and copper.
If you are not familiar with heatsinks, they are typically made of copper or aluminium, which are both metals that serve as thermal conductors. If you do not know what a heatsink is, you can read more about it here. They frequently come with a number of metal fins that are designed to pull and spread heat away from the essential components on your device in order to assist in preventing those components from overheating. A fan located nearby then expels the heat that has been generated by the system.
Traditional heat sinks can be replaced with “a conformal coating of copper” and “an electrical insulating layer of poly” that is spread across the entire device, according to a study that was published in Nature Electronics by a group of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley. The study was conducted jointly.
When compared to heatsinks, the researchers say that this method of cooling provides “very similar performance, or even better performance.” Because it also does away with the requirement for a cumbersome piece of metal, this could save a significant amount of space inside electronic devices. According to the researchers, this can increase the power output of a device by up to 740 percent per unit volume. According to the findings of the study, “you can stack much more printed circuit boards in the same volume when you are using our coating as compared to if you are using conventional liquid- or air-cooled heat sinks.” [Citation needed] This information was gleaned from the research conducted on the subject.
The researchers are still determining whether or not this coating is effective, and they intend to test it out on power modules and graphics cards in the near future. It is too soon to tell whether this kind of technology would be something that PC part manufacturers would precoat their components with or if it would be something that you would have to do on your own.
If the coating does prove to be a practical alternative to heat sinks, it has the potential to dramatically alter the look of electronic devices in ways that I just can’t even begin to imagine. It’s possible that the coating will render the heat sink completely useless. Even though I would miss the cool shields that manufacturers make to hide the heatsinks on motherboards, I think that if they weren’t there, designers would have even more freedom to express their creativity in the way that a variety of components look and how they function.