PICOTEK LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N181-081

Description

The current exponential growth of energy consumption in supercomputers and data centers has become an ecological and economical problem for simple reasons of power delivery, power dissipation and heat removal. To go on with the exponential growth in the use of information we need to continue reducing the energy required to handle each bit. This reduction, however, becomes an increasingly harder problem. We propose a new strategy for the more efficient cooling of electronics, where cooling is achieved through efficient anti-Stokes spontaneous emission from quantum dots and low-dimensional structures embedded into a waveguide structure and excited by external laser emission. The physical mechanism is that of laser cooling and requires quantum dots with very efficient anti-Stokes emission. Various designs of the cooling device are explored to find the most efficient way for spontaneous emission extraction to prevent reabsorption and reheating in electronics. The geometry of a single device allows the fabrication of a planar structure for cooling 3D stacks of electronics, where power dissipation and heat removal becomes the most severe problem for the difficulty in designing effective heat sinks. The concept provides a means for implementation of such heat sinks as cooling planes compatible with 3D stacks of electronics.