Forbes.com: Throwing Cold Water On Moore's Law

It's one of the great touchstones of technology, made in 1965 by Intel founder Gordon Moore, who observed that the number of transistors on integrated circuits--what nonengineers call computer chips--tend to double every 18 to 24 months. Doubling the transistor count on a chip is achieved mostly by shrinking the very size of the transistors themselves--and keeping Moore's Law in force is the chief occupation of chip designers everywhere.

But it's a double-edged sword: Pack more transistors on a chip and you draw more power, which in turn generates more heat. That heat needs to be dissipated or the computer the chip is in might burst into flames. Open up a new Power Mac G5 from Apple Computer and you can't help but notice the emphasis on fans and air flow meant to cool those IBM -made processors, along with the huge hunks of metal called heatsinks that pick up the heat and carry it away from the chip.

A Silicon Valley startup called Cooligy has some curious ideas about how to cool chips in the near future. It uses between half a cup and a cup of water, depending on the size of the computer, to build a heat-dissipating circulation system within the computer to carry heat away from the chip and dissipate it through the body of the machine.