Photos: Inside IBM's Zurich research lab

Instead of a heat sink, chips could be covered with a liquid cooling device. This is an "immersion jet impingement" with distributed coolant returns.

The device is about the size of the packaging on a current Pentium processor but inside that small space there are 50,000 coolant nozzles. The result is that coolant can be circulated very quickly.

Dr Michel believes this is another promising research strand.