A company out of Santa Clara, California, has debuted a tiny chip powerful enough to act as a fan and cool a device’s processor. On Tuesday, xMEMS Labs introduced the xMEMS XMC-2400 µCooling chip for smartphones, tablets, and other portable electronics. It ditches the traditional spinning fan for a “silicon, solid-state” design that essentially vibrates airflow within its tiny package to dissipate heat.
The technology is similar to another cooling chip from San Jose-based Frore Systems, which also uses tiny membranes that vibrate at an ultrasonic frequency to create airflow. Frore debuted the “AirJet” technology in December 2022 and has been trying to sell it to PC makers and smartphone vendors. The difference is that the cooling chip from xMEMS is about four times smaller while measuring 1 millimeter thick. In addition, the company claims the µCooling chip can provide 16 times more “airflow per volume” over Frore’s AirJet technology. In a demo, the lab showed the chip generating enough air flow to push a small fan.
(Credit: xMEMS Lab)
The xMEMS chip is based on the company’s microspeaker components, which also vibrate within a small silicon package to create sound. The resulting µCooling chip promises to offer “silent, vibration-free” active cooling, which can help today’s smartphones reach even higher performance in CPU or GPU processing without overheating. The company is betting smartphone vendors will adopt the cooling chip when the industry has been embracing AI programs — which require even more computing power to run.
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(Credit: xMEMS Lab)
“The XMC-2400 is designed to actively cool even the smallest handheld form factors, enabling the thinnest, most high-performance, AI-ready mobile devices,” says xMEMS CEO Joseph Jiang. “It’s hard to imagine tomorrow’s smartphones and other thin, performance-oriented devices without xMEMS µCooling technology.”Next month, the company will demo the cooling chip in Shenzhen, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. It plans to sample the chip to interested customers in next year’s first quarter.
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About Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
I’ve been with PCMag since October 2017, covering a wide range of topics, including consumer electronics, cybersecurity, social media, networking, and gaming. Prior to working at PCMag, I was a foreign correspondent in Beijing for over five years, covering the tech scene in Asia.
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