As technology advances, engineers are finding new ways to build powerful microchips by stacking them on top of each other—just like a high-rise building made of electronics.
This 3D chip design could lead to smaller, faster, and more efficient systems for artificial intelligence, communication, and imaging.
But there’s a major challenge: these stacked chips get very hot, and there’s no easy way to cool them down.
To help solve this issue, researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have created a special chip that acts as both a heat generator and a temperature sensor.
The chip is designed to test how well cooling systems work when applied to stacked microchips.
It generates heat similar to what high-performance chips produce, and then measures how the temperature changes when different cooling methods are used.
This allows scientists to see how heat moves through the chip layers and whether cooling technologies are working properly.
Normally, if you have just one chip, you can cool it from above or below. But when chips are stacked, the heat gets trapped in the middle, making it much harder to remove. Right now, there aren’t any good cooling solutions for these dense chip stacks.
That’s why this test chip is so important—it’s the first step in solving this overheating problem.
The chip is now being used by HRL Laboratories, a research company supported by Boeing and General Motors, to help develop new cooling systems.
These systems are especially needed for a type of chip stacking called 3D heterogeneous integration (3DHI), where chips made from different materials are layered together. This can include powerful radio-frequency (RF) chips, which tend to get very hot.
Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the chip is part of a larger program called Minitherms3D, which aims to create miniature thermal management systems for 3DHI.
This research could eventually lead to big improvements in defense technology, such as better radar, communications, and AI-powered systems for drones and other equipment.
The test chip has circuits that produce intense heat—similar to what future chips are expected to generate. It also includes tiny sensors, or “thermometers,” made of special components called diodes that measure temperature changes throughout the chip.
These measurements are especially valuable in areas where cooling is most difficult, such as deep inside the chip stack where hot spots can form. The chip helps engineers test whether cooling techniques, like tiny liquid channels, are reaching those hidden areas.
By giving researchers a way to measure and solve heating problems in stacked microchips, this chip could play a key role in powering the future of electronics—making devices faster, more compact, and more reliable.
