Laser cooling company Maxwell Labs has entered into a research agreement with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico (UNM).

The trio plan to develop laser-based photonic cooling for high-density data center processors.

Maxwell Labs is working on a photonic cold plate designed to replace or complement traditional air- and water-based cooling systems. It uses laser light to target and cool localized hot spots on chips, which it hopes will reduce power usage, improve efficiency, and enable energy recovery paradigms not possible with conventional methods.

“A successful project will not only address the immediate need for energy savings but also pave the way for processors to operate at performance levels that were previously thought impossible,” said Mike Karpe, co-founder and chief growth officer of Maxwell Labs.

“This collaboration positions us to redefine the future of computing.”

Under the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), Maxwell Labs will provide the technical designs, while Sandia Labs will fabricate highly pure gallium arsenide-based devices, and UNM will evaluate the thermal performance of the systems that come out of the project.

“The unique capability of light to target and control localized heating unlocks thermal design constraints so fundamental to chip design that it’s hard to predict the full impact – but it will fundamentally change the types of problems we can solve with computers,” said Maxwell Labs CEO Jacob Balma.

“Our models show this laser-based approach can keep chips colder than water-based systems, enabling higher performance and novel energy recovery.”