Nextreme’s eTEC thermoelectric component

Nextreme’s eTEC thermoelectric component

The eTEC thermoelectric cooler/heater from Nextreme (Durham, NC) represents a new approach to electronic thermal management that focuses on providing appropriate cooling when and where it is needed within the electronics system. The device pulled in a 2007 Product of the Year Award, so we asked the company to give us some insight into how it came to be.

Design achievements

This approach does not displace system-level cooling, which is still needed to move heat out of the system. Rather, it introduces a new methodology for achieving temperature uniformity at the chip and board level.

In this manner the system-level thermal management system will become more efficient. In addition, while system-level solutions typically scale with the size of the system (bigger fans for bigger systems, etc.), Nextreme’s solution scales at the chip level.

Design hurdles

Because this is fundamentally different from anything that’s been done before, there has been the initial challenge of educating people about the technology and helping them understand how it can be used.

The engineering effort

Nextreme’s CEO Jesko von Windheim, a serial entrepreneur, organized the company in 2004 to commercialize thin-film thermoelectric technology. But the company points out that the majority of the engineering effort has been collaborative. Early on, Nextreme collaborated with the Research Triangle Park’s Center for Thermoelectrics Research to commercialize the technology—thin-film thermoelectrics made from a semiconductor alloy—that emerged from work with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Significant application areas

Company officials have been a bit surprised at the market attraction. When the company started, the focus was exclusively on thermal management for CPU and GPU chips, thinking that was the immediate need because semiconductor technology was stagnating due to thermal problems.

But as they’ve educated the market to the technology, company officials are being introduced to significant thermal roadblocks across almost every industry and customers are showing them how to use the technology in ways they hadn’t imagined.

Lately the company is seeing application for the product in laser-diode temperature control, LED cooling, semiconductor hot-spot cooling, and thermal cycling for semiconductor test and burn-in systems. There has also been interest in power-generation or energy-scavenging applications.

Ralph Raiola