What If a Computer's Waste Heat Could Drive Increased Performance?

A new paper from MIT lays out a novel means of computing by using heat transfer in specially designed silicon structures.

It won't replace regular transistors any time soon, but it's not intended to. Instead, the project could let future computing turn waste heat into extra compute power. That's especially important in the era of gigawatt data centers and their absurd cooling requirements. In fact, this work is the culmination of prior research into computational chip design, which created an algorithm that iteratively created and tested simulated geometries.

When given a target functionality, usually a particular pattern of heat conductivity, this algorithm can slowly hone in on the best possible design. The researchers refer to this as "inverse design," since they start with a goal and work backwards to a technology.

Using this approach, the team can inversely design a structure that conducts heat in very specific ...