Advanced Thermal Packaging
IBM Research Laboratory, Zurich, Switzerland
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Tuesday, 14 December 2010 (15h30-16h00), EPFL Polydôme

Building a Smarter Energy Future

Smarter Energy is a worldwide effort within IBM Research driving the strategy and plan around the Smarter Energy industrial transformation. Smarter Energy includes the ways in which energy is transformed, distributed, and consumed. Our world is interconnected in an unprecedented fashion: For the first time in history, almost anything can become digitally aware. The impact which information technology (IT) will have on the use of energy in our society is substantial, and is characterized by three key aspects.

Computing for energy describes the application of IT to improve our use of energy by enabling smart power grids, energy-efficient buildings, traffic management and datacenter energy monitoring. Energy in computing addresses the energy efficiency of IT itself, including novel transistor materials, chip-scale packaging approaches, cooling technologies and waste heat reuse. Energy for computing concerns sustainable means to power IT in the future, including improved photovoltaic electricity generation and energy storage.

In this talk, an overview of the IBM Research Smarter Energy activities will be given. The focus will be on projects involving the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, which include the zero-emission datacenter, combined concentrated photovoltaics and desalination, heat-driven cooling, electric vehicles in a distributed and integrated market using sustainable energy and open network (EDISON), EcoGridEU, and data center energy management.

 

About the speakers:

Bruno Michel received a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Zurich and subsequently joined IBM Research to work on scanning probe microscopy. He then introduced microcontact printing and led an international industry project for the development of accurate large-area soft lithography. Dr. Michel started the Advanced Thermal Packaging group in response to the needs of the industry for improved thermal interfaces and better miniaturized convective cooling. Main current research topics of the Zurich group are microtechnology, microfluidics,  3D packaging (NanoTera CMOSAIC),  thermophysics,  datacenter energy re-use for future green IT, concentrated photovoltaics, desalination, and adsorption chillers. Bruno Michel is responsible for the IBM Smarter Energy Strategy at the Zurich Research Laboratory.

Patrick Ruch studied Materials Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and completed his dissertation at the Paul Scherrer Institut in the field of electrochemical energy storage in 2009. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory with main interests in the field of renewable energy generation, energy conversion and storage. Dr. Ruch is actively involved in IBM's Smarter Energy projects.