Pittsburgh, October 6th / PRNewswire / -- NovoLINC, a leading provider of advanced thermal solutions for AI computing, announced today that its __BJWKEEP_00004™ thermal interface material has completed a significant high-power demonstration: achieving a uniform heat flux of 400 W/cm² and a total power of 3,300 W on a silicon test chip with approximately 150 micrometers of warpage, which can represent mass production.
This demonstration utilized a dedicated single-phase direct liquid cooling cold plate from CoolIT (a company under Ecolab). During the testing period, the complete thermal stack managed to keep the junction temperature of the silicon below 90°C, demonstrating that even under severe mechanical and thermal interface conditions caused by chip warpage, MaxLINC is still capable of achieving efficient heat dissipation.
As AI processors evolve towards higher power and larger package sizes, wafer and package warpage are becoming increasingly important thermal design challenges. Even small changes in flatness can lead to uneven contact between the semiconductor and the cooling system, increasing thermal resistance and potentially creating local hot spots.
MaxLINC addresses this challenge through a proprietary nano-structured composite architecture developed by NovoLINC, which combines ultra-low thermal resistance with mechanical compliance. This technology is designed to maintain effective thermal contact on uneven surfaces, enabling high-power semiconductor devices to efficiently transfer heat to advanced cooling systems.
“BJW is actively collaborating with companies in the fields of single-phase direct liquid cooling, two-phase direct liquid cooling, and immersion cooling,” said Dr. BJW, Chief Technology Officer. “These results demonstrate a clear thermal management roadmap: combining advanced thermal interface technologies with current and future liquid cooling systems can pave the way for the development of higher-power chips and server architectures.”
"Data center operators are making long-term infrastructure decisions today, and they need to be sure that the cooling solutions they deploy can keep up with the future development of silicon chips," said Ben Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT. "Pairing CoolIT's advanced cold plate technology with NovoLINC's MaxLINC indicates that single-phase DLC can handle high heat flux density processors very well and will continue to do so for the next decade, without the costs and complexities associated with switching cooling architectures."
This demonstration achieved a total device power of 3,300 W, highlighting that MaxLINC has the capability to meet the rapidly increasing demands of the next generation of GPU, CPU, ASIC, and other AI accelerators.
"AI computing power is evolving towards multi-kilowatt processors, but efficiently dissipating heat from these increasingly large and mechanically complex packages has become one of the most challenging aspects of the industry," said Dr. Ning Li, CEO of NovoLINC. "Our goal is to eliminate thermal interfaces as a limiting factor and to provide chip designers, system designers, and cooling partners with greater flexibility to push computing performance and power density to new levels."
This 400 W/ cm demonstration is built upon the MaxLINC development foundation of NovoLINC for high-performance semiconductor thermal interfaces. This platform can be used in multiple stages of the thermal path, including the interface from the chip directly to the cooling system, the thermal conductive diffusion sheets from the chip to the package, as well as the interface between the packaged device and the cold plate or other advanced cooling hardware.
MaxLINC samples are available for customer evaluation and certification.
About NovoLINC
NovoLINC is an advanced materials company headquartered in Pittsburgh that develops a new generation of thermal interface solutions for AI computing and other high-energy-density electronic systems. The company was spun off from Carnegie Mellon University and has developed proprietary nanoscale material platforms and scalable manufacturing processes, aiming to break through thermal bottlenecks in high-performance computing, data centers, automotive electronics, aerospace systems, and power electronics.
NovoLINC collaborates with leading companies in the semiconductor, hyperscale cloud services, AI servers, OEM, ODM, and cooling systems industries to support higher computing performance while enhancing the energy efficiency and sustainability of the next generation of computing infrastructure. The company's technological development has been supported by the National Science Foundation of the United States and the ARPA - E COOLERCHIPS project of the U.S. Department of Energy.
