Mr. Hoffman: Amulaire participates in the thermal solution space. We provide different types of products, such as heat sinks and cold plates, into a variety of markets. Our goal is to solve the heat problems that manufacturers face by more efficiently extracting heat from hot components, typically in IC-based systems.
TWST: What are the current trends in the thermal management space and the key
drivers of your solution?
Mr. Hoffman: The thermal trends are actually quite compelling, and they've been
going on for a while and affect not only the IC level, but also the module,
component and system levels. The main trend is something we call power density
increase. Essentially, what's happening is that systems or ICs or components are
all getting smaller, while the amount of heat generated is staying the same or
increasing. That leads to more heat in a smaller area or smaller-size component.
This problem is pretty severe, actually; it's severe at the server farm and
server levels, at the modules that go into servers and at the IC package level.
So it's a pretty general trend and it's leading to quite severe issues in
thermal management across the board. So, I would say that's the major trend.
The other trend that is always underlying thermal issues is the increasing
performance level of all kinds of devices and systems. Typically, increasing
performance also means increasing power, and therefore more heat is generated.
So in general we're seeing applications where lots and lots of thermal energy
has to be extracted.
The key point of Amulaire's solution, obviously, is how to respond to these
trends, how to get more heat extracted in smaller and smaller size devices.
That's where our underlying copper molding technology comes into play. In
general, heat transfer devices or thermal management devices operate best when
they have a large surface area that can transfer heat from whatever is
generating the heat into a medium such as air or water that takes the heat away.
This means that surface area is very critical.
Other attributes that are important include the shape of heat transfer areas
such as fans, which are quite important because they take the fluid mechanics
behind the solution and translate it directly into things that a customer sees —
like how big a pump or fan must be to drive their solution. With Amulaire's
copper molding technology, we have essentially unlimited flexibility in the
shapes we can produce, and we can achieve extremely good density in terms of
small feature sizes. So that gives us both of those critical factors. Being able
to have high surface area and control over the shape, we can provide extremely
good heat transfer while at the same time not seriously affecting — or in many
cases actually reducing — the requirements for fans and pumps and the power that
they would consume.
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