Water management innovation is central to the future of ICs

eetimes.com

39 points·giuliomagnifico··8 comments

I'm not sure of the issues here. Clearly water is used for cooling, but there could be a closed system of clean water that is cooled with e.g. seawater by simple conduction.

The other thing seems to be that water is used for cleaning, which means it ends up containing toxins. That seems to be a much harder problem to solve since you need to filter/destroy/neutralise the toxins?

Water cooling systems typically use distilled water because seawater is too corrosive

Might not scale well if it heats up the localized conduction region or leaches out. The NYC subway use to need to be heated quite a bit because all the surrounding rock absorbed all the heat. Now, it’s saturated and requires massive cooling systems

Same in London.

“Why it’s (almost) impossible to cool the tube” https://youtu.be/hQo6_GkITe0

Quite informative.

At least with above ground water probably easier to dispel the heat .

They also have issues in desalination plants of pumping the resulting salty brine back.

TSMC is already had what is probably the best water management strategy in the industry. Other competitors are certainly lagging.

Sidenote: This seems to advertorial from TSMC.

What are ICs? Terrible article when it doesn't explain an acronym.

Integrated Circuits. The article is on a technical website so I think they assume you already know what is the acronym of IC. But anyways add two words of explanation wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com