Laser Precision: Cooling Chips With Photonics

Modern high-performance chips are marvels of engineering, containing tens of billions of transistors. The problem is, you can’t use them all at once. If you did, you would create hot spots—high temperatures concentrated in tiny areas—with power densities nearing those found at the surface of the sun. This has led to a frustrating paradox known as dark silicon, a term coined by computer architects to describe the growing portion of a chip that must be kept powered down. Up to 80 percent of the