Enabling simultaneous cooling and data transmission in the terahertz band for board-to-board communications

A system enabling simultaneous cooling and board-to-board communications is proposed and analyzed. It is shown that hollow pipes used in computer cooling systems can be applied for communications with extreme data rates at distances up to tens of centimeters. This is done by using wireless communications in the terahertz frequency band, 0.1-10 THz. The experiments were performed in order to observe how straight and curved pipes of different diameters and lengths affect THz signals propagating inside the pipes. The measured pulses were recorded and used in numerical evaluation of bit error rate and throughput taking into account the effect of all possible combinations of N previous symbols. The numerical results show the dependency of the intersymbol interference on the delay profile of the channel and on the symbol period. The results demonstrate that even with simple on-off keying modulation the throughput reaches few terabits per second with qualitatively low bit error rates. This enables communications between rate-hungry electronics inside computers such as central and graphical processing units while simultaneously providing the cooling functionality. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.