Dylan Patel explains three advanced cooling and power techniques for wafer-scale systems: vertical power delivery into silicon, flexible moving-pin interposers that handle thermal expansion, and direct-impingement water cooling that channels coolant to 84 individual dies.
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This is in fact the first true example of vertical power delivery, right? Because the power is coming in perpendicular to the silicon, which is necessary for this kind of wafer-scale design. So these are also some of the things that they've had to innovate, right, by necessity to achieve this practical implementation of wafer-scale design. And then in order to mount the wafer onto the PCB for power delivery, because the wafer will expand and contract with temperature at a different rate to the PCB and the surrounding system. They needed to implement this custom flexible connector. It's almost like an interposer, but it has pins that can move around so that when the wafer heats up and cools down, the connections are maintained. And so this is another proprietary innovation that they have to come up with. And cooling, you have a really complex cold plate that distributes the water onto each of the 84 dies and then does the direct impingement downwards. So you end up with a pretty interesting design that's not seen anywhere else.