Thermacore to develop heatsinks for DARPA

If you've always thought that the thing missing from top-end consumer computing devices was military technology, your dreams might just be coming true courtesy of Thermacore and DARPA.

According to ExtremeTech, Thermacore – a manufacturer of heatsinks and other chip cooling devices – has been given a $9.5 million contract due to run through to 2013 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to improve air-based cooling systems in military equipment.

The project – dubbed MACE, or Micro-technologies for Air-Cooled Exchanges – is due to look at innovative approaches to air-cooling systems in order to improve their thermal profiles. While DARPA will be looking for the new technologies that come out of the project to be applied to such things are RADAR sets and weapon systems, Thermacore will be likely to use the results to improve their commercial offerings as well.

Gregg Baldassarre, the vice president of sales and marketing at the company, has stated that "conventional air cooled heat sinks do not provide the necessary cooling for the existing or future high performance DoD systems," and hopes that his company can introduce "innovative air cooled technologies rather than the more complex and costly alternative cooling technologies" such as submersion cooling, pumped liquid cooling, and vapour-compression refrigeration cooling.

With the company having already developed heat pipes capable of working at temperatures ranging from -260°C to 2000°C and transferring heat over long distances, it's likely that we're going to see some pretty snazzy tech come out of this partnership.

Hoping for some 'cool' cryogenic heat pipe technology to come out of the partnership between DARPA and Thermacore, or do you think it'll be many years before we civvies get the same toys as the military? Share your thoughts over in the forums.