Frore Systems unveils membrane-based liquid cooling system without pump or moving components

Solid-state active cooling technology holds enormous, untapped potential. Its ability to cool components without moving parts more effectively than a heatsink and more efficiently than a fan could revolutionise consumer hardware, but Frore Systems, one of the pioneers in its development, has already set its sights on data centres with a new membrane designed for liquid cooling systems.

Presented at the Hot Chips 2024 conference, Frore’s LiquidJet technology is an adaptation of the current AirJet, but using water instead of micro air currents. Essentially, this MEMS cooler uses an ultrasonic transducer that vibrates membranes to generate suction-extraction, so that it takes cold air from the outside on one side and expels it hot on the other, generating a continuous flow without the need for mechanical parts. per se.

Frore didn’t detail how he plans to adapt (or has adapted) his MEMS cooling technology to run on water rather than air, but he says the LiquidJet’s heat dissipation capacity would be 22kW versus the AirJet’s 5.25W. That’s an impressive figure, but possibly a bit of a cheat, given that a data center cooling system would need to be much larger than the AirJet systems, which are designed for SSDs, laptops, and thin clients.

Still in the experimental phase, LiquidJet has years of development ahead of it before it reaches the market. If it ever does. Its technological foundation, however, is a tangible reality. Although the first prototypes were shown less than three years ago, AirJet has already been integrated into a mini PC (the Zotac ZBOX PI430AJ) and several high-performance SSDsand adaptations have even been proposed for Urban sensors, action cameras and mobile phones which are supposedly being evaluated by several manufacturers.