Anybody who has opened an electronic device once in their life has seen a chip cooler/fan combination that keeps the silicon chips cool.
This way of controlling the temperature of electronics is pretty old, fairly inefficient and tends to be pretty noisy. The innovations made in the last few years in the field of computer hardware and consumer electronics are mostly concerned with reducing the noise that is emitted by the fan. In their latest flagship laptop, Apple has introduced a fan with asymmetrically spaced impeller blades that leads to a lower operating volume by spreading the sound produced across a broader range of the frequency spectrum.
In the future cooling might work a bit differently, at least if the researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have anything to say about this. They have developed a cooling unit that works without a fan or any kind of thermal compounds that are usually put between the cooler and the chip.
All of this is still in prototype stage, but it looks extremely promising. You can find out more about this technology by following the link below or watching the embedded video.
