Researchers from the IIT Bombay and C-MET, Pune have proposed using Low-Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) as an efficient alternative to conventionally used copper for making cold plates.

Cooling of Supercomputers

• High-Performance Computing systems (HPCs) or supercomputers resort to cooling using liquid coolants and cold plates that dissipate heat.
  • In liquid-cooled devices, liquid coolants like deionised water are circulated through system to remove excess heat.
  • Cold plates are used like a heat sink transferring heat from circuit components into the coolant liquid and copper is presently the preferred material due to high thermal conductivity.

Use of LTCC for cold plates

• LTCC is a technology used to manufacture ceramic substrates for circuits. 
  • Substrates are materials on which electrical interconnections are printed resistors, inductors, etc. are mounted.
• It facilitates 3D circuit packing, making designs more compact and efficient than conventional PCB (Printed Circuit Boards).
• LTCC can effectively cool microprocessor chips in supercomputers. 

About Supercomputers

• Supercomputers are largest and more powerful computers that have multiple central processing units grouped into ‘compute nodes’.
  • Their performance is measured in Floating-Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).
• Application of Supercomputers: Scientific research, Space exploration, Weather Forecasting and Climate Modelling, Genomic Sequencing, etc.