TDK backs graphene thermal interface startup for data centre cooling

TDK is backing stealth start-up NovoLinc for its high-performance thermal interface material for data centre chips.

TDK ventures is investing in NovoLinc in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that has used proprietary materials system and nanomechanical design to lower thermal resistance. The technology, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, was incubated in the US ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS programme.

The investment round was led by M Ventures, the venture arm of materials giant Merck in Germany, with Foothill Ventures. The size of the seed round was not disclosed and the company website is just a holding page.

However CTO Dr. Rui Cheng has been working on 3D graphene coated copper nanowire “sandwich” as a thermal interface that enables an ultralow thermal resistance of ∼0.24 mm2·K/W that is about 10 times more efficient that solder and up to 1000 times better than thermal greases, gels, and epoxies.

The flexible 3D “sandwich” exhibits excellent long-term reliability with >1000 cycles over a broad temperature range from −55 °C to 125 °C and so can allow GPUs and CPUs to operate at lower temperatures with coldplate technologies such as those developed by Iceotope in the UK.

The growth in energy demands for data centres are well documented and cooling costs represent up to 40% of the total data centre energy expenditure.

The shift from air cooling to liquid cooling is driving the need to improve the thermal interface between the chip and heat sink which is becoming the critical bottleneck in cooling architecture. Traditional thermal interface materials struggle to meet the demands of modern computing environments with complex heterogeneous chiplet designs such as the Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU.

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NovoLinc says its technology has an exceptionally low thermal resistance of under 1mm²-K/W with improved reliability through a high-throughput production method.

“NovoLINC is tackling one of the most pressing technical challenges concerning data-centre cooling and semiconductor thermal management. As data centres and chip manufacturers transition to liquid cooling, NovoLINC’s thermal interface technology offers the performance and scalability needed to support this industry-wide shift,” said TDK Ventures President Nicolas Sauvage