Maxwell Labs, a Minnesota-based startup, has entered a collaborative research agreement with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico to test laser-based photonic cooling for computer chips. The project aims to regulate chip temperatures using light rather than conventional air or water-based systems, potentially reducing energy usage and improving overall efficiency.
“About 30 to 40 percent of the energy data centers use is spent on cooling,” said Dr. Raktim Sarma, lead physicist at Sandia. In some areas, the water demand for current systems can strain local resources, making innovation in chip cooling urgent.
Maxwell’s experimental cold plate technology channels cooling laser light to localized hot spots on chips—areas just hundreds of microns in size. By targeting only the specific regions that require cooling, the system could enable processors to operate at higher performance levels without overheating.
“A successful project will not only address the immediate need for energy savings but also pave the way for processors to operate at performance levels that were previously thought impossible,” said Mike Karpe, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Maxwell Labs.
Though lasers are generally associated with heating applications, under precise conditions, they can cool materials. The photonic cold plate, which Maxwell aims to commercialize, would replace or complement traditional cooling systems, capturing and converting heat in the form of light back into electricity.
“This will enable novel energy-recovery paradigms not possible with traditional cooling technology,” said Maxwell CEO Jacob Balma. “The unique capability of light to target and control localized heating spatially and at optical timescales for these devices unlocks thermal design constraints that are so fundamental to chip design that it is hard to speculate what chip architects will do with it—but I trust that it will fundamentally change the types of problems we can solve with computers.”
The cold plate is built using gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material requiring extremely high purity. Sandia’s expertise in growing epitaxial layers of gallium arsenide using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is critical to the device’s functionality. “With MBE, we use ultrahigh purity sources, we can control the thickness of materials with a precision of less than one atomic layer, and we grow the layers under ultrahigh vacuum,” said Sandia’s Sadhvikas Addamane.
Balma’s team at Maxwell worked with Sarma previously through co-founder and CTO Alejandro Rodriguez, a Princeton University professor. Rodriguez said, “It became clear to me from this collaboration that Dr. Sarma and Sandia Labs are among only a handful of partners that carry the vision, appetite, and technical capabilities to address the highly interdisciplinary and pioneering materials, electronics, and photonic components of this project.”
The collaboration is being conducted under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). Maxwell Labs will lead design, Sandia will fabricate the devices, and the University of New Mexico will assess thermal performance. Sandia executed 72 new CRADAs in fiscal year 2024—its second-highest annual total in the labs’ 75-year history.
About Maxwell Labs
Maxwell Labs is a Minnesota-based technology startup focused on developing next-generation photonic cooling technologies for data centers and AI applications. Its innovations seek to reduce power consumption and improve the thermal efficiency of chip architectures. For more information, please click here.
About Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA-0003525. With expertise in engineering, materials science, and photonics, Sandia advances national security through innovation.
Source/Photo Credit: Sandia National Laboratories
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