Electronic Design Weekly: Oct. 19, 2026 - Liquid Cooling
In This Issue
- Editorial: Focus on Liquid Cooling
- Featured Content
- New Products
- Focus on: Liquid Cooling
- Multimedia on ElectronicDesign
- Editor's Choice: From the ElectronicDesign Archives
- Editor's Weekly Picks
- Illustrated Engineering
- Electronic Design Word of the Week
- New in Electronic Design's Member Library
- More Electronic Design Weekly
Welcome to Electronic Design's weekly issue where you can find the latest articles, videos, and interviews as well as insights into what the editorial team has been thinking about and working on lately. Think of it as a dynamic, fully digital issue of Electronic Design magazine.
The theme for this week is liquid cooling. Scroll down to see some of the latest coverage on the technologies helping to keep AI data centers from overheating. Prefer to get these and other articles delivered directly to your inbox? Subscribe to one of our newsletters. You can also check out archived versions of Electronic Design Weekly.
- James Morra
Priming the Pump for Liquid Cooling
In data centers, where a single AI accelerator can consume more than a kilowatt of power itself and a full compute rack can generate more than 100 kW of heat, air cooling is falling behind.
As AI power demands move toward a megawatt per rack, hyperscalers and other tech giants are installing liquid-cooling infrastructure throughout their data centers. A single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack contains more than 100 fluid connections that circulate coolant within inches of some of the most advanced silicon on the market. Multiply those across thousands of racks, and the result is a sprawling network of pumps, pipes, manifolds, and other cooling infrastructure.
Click to continue reading the rest of the editorial.
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Globe and video wallEditor's Choice: From the ElectronicDesign Archives
These articles were chosen by the editors at ElectronicDesign that complement the new articles above. They’re included in our regular newsletters.
Andy's Picks from Around the Web
Meta's smart glasses were recording conversations without the wake phrase, company admits. Link
India’s electric car sales share tops US for six straight months from April. Link
A wind farm in Hopefield, South Africa, painted two red stripes on one blade of four turbines, and a preprint not yet peer reviewed estimates bird deaths at those turbines fell a median 83 percent. Link
New chip-scale gyroscope measures rotation with unprecedented sensitivity. Link
Electrical engineering research unlocks DNA mystery. Link
Batteries beat gas peakers on cost globally, but U.S. faces trade headwinds. Link
Andy's Video Pick of the Week
The circus came to town in McGregor Tx mid last week under the guise of the Tesla Roadster 2.0. Yet another Tesla Ludicrous mode, but this time I'm alleging it's the CEO's fiduciary disregard to shareholders, not a car.
2 ton thrust cold gas (compressed nitrogen) thrusters generate the "car's" force vectors in roll, pitch, yaw, and lift, which would create barotrauma to any formerly-living fauna nearby, not to mention shear flesh off bone and embed sand and gravel into flesh and your old F-150's patina.
Click here to see three more short paragraphs - spoiler...there is an amazing engineering video link in here
A set of fans creates a negative pressure chamber in a "skirt" (think reverse hovercraft) to hold the car upside down - again not an original idea and McMurtry is actually shipping cars to customers that do this for downforce and cornering. The Roadster is not cornering, with it hanging upside down, not moving, like a Star Trek TOS Denevan neural parasite - indeed, the car even flies like one.
So, Musk, who seems to always resurrect old tech - stuff like 1950's Mech Illustrated magazine covers - or gets ideas, like diecasting, watching his kid play with Hot Wheels cars) has had his boffins at SpaceX mathturbate and basically rig up a copy of what Lockheed did ~25 years ago, for a kinetic kill vehicle under Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program, using SpaceX rockets' thruster parts.
This is all unlikely to be street legal, but he's posted on Social Media that, for those wanting to flaunt their obscene wealth, he's setting up a lifesize Hot Wheels loops for the owners' cars to run on at SpaceX in Texas. yee-haw!
Bill Wong's Cool Picks of the Week
In keeping with the liquid cooling theme, here are a few of my picks this week. Liquid cooling is not something new although some of the implementations are.
- Cooled With Water Droplets, Amplifiers Emit Powerful Signals @ Microwaves & RF
An engineering team at Lockheed Martin has built an experimental cooling system that sprays tiny drops of water on the bottom of microchips, dissipating large amounts of heat. - Design for Manufacturing: The Cool Factor @ Industry Week
Mikros Technologies specializes in sapping excess heat out of electronic systems, something that it only accomplishes with a strong focus on produceable designs. - Elma adds liquid flow through cooling to OpenVPX development platform @ Military+Aerospace Electronics
Elma Electronic Inc. of Fremont, California has added liquid flow through cooling capabilities to its expanding line of OpenVPX development platforms. Designed to accept up to six 6U VPX modules on a 1” pitch, the new chassis also incorporates either a built-in power supply or a VITA 62 plug-in power module. - NASA Preps Probe for Mission to the Sun @ Machine Design
The Parker Solar Probe will launch next summer on an almost-seven-year, 24-orbit mission to explore our nearest star.
Urine for a treat.
This week's cartoon ties in one of my passions (which is creating metal sculptures in an art class I take at Portland Community College) with James' editorial theme.
Here's a piece I made of the first student-created bronze from a 3D print that I drew in CAD:
Yet another one to add to my Inventors Comics Collection:
The chain over the crucible popped in out of nowhere in the last iteration (the AI sneaks stuff in, like making Rocks-anne heavier for example) - close enough, since I don't want to risk it wrecking all the work that got me this far. It's just a fancy pen, but one that sneaks in political correctness and the social agenda of the AI's programmers. It even added glasses in one iteration of this one to be more inclusive. Ugh, they're cave people, though Rocks-anne did go to university, obviously.
Engineering on Friday Halloween #3
INFOGRAPHIC too big to put here, just a bit of the top here.
I have been a huge fan of The Walking Dead from the beginning, but I always questioned why haven't the engineers rebuilt the world?
In this infographic, I set out to solve a challenge using TWD's world physics and items. See the whole infographic and story here.
or
See the rest of my toons at the Engineering on Friday comic gallery.
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About the Author
William G. WongWilliam G. Wong
Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.
You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.
Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.
You can visit my social media via these links:
- AltEmbedded on Electronic Design
- Bill Wong on Facebook
- @AltEmbedded on Twitter
- Bill Wong on LinkedIn
I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.
I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.
Roger Engelke Jr.Roger Engelke Jr.
Managing Editor - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
Roger manages the websites and print issues for Electronic Design and Microwaves &RF.
Cabe AtwellCabe Atwell
Technology Editor, Electronic Design
Cabe is a Technology Editor for Electronic Design.
Engineer, Machinist, Cartoonist, Maker, Writer. A graduate Electrical Engineer actively plying his expertise in the industry and at his company, Gunhead. When not designing/building, he creates a steady torrent of projects and content in the media world. Many of his projects and articles are online at element14 & SolidSmack, industry-focused work at EETimes & EDN, and offbeat articles at Make Magazine. Currently, you can find him hosting webinars and contributing to Electronic Design and Machine Design.
Cabe is an electrical engineer, design consultant and author with 25 years’ experience. His most recent book is “Essential 555 IC: Design, Configure, and Create Clever Circuits”
Cabe writes the Engineering Life & Engineering on Friday blog on Electronic Design.
See Cabe's cartoons & comic strips here.
James MorraJames Morra
Senior Editor
James Morra is the senior editor for Electronic Design, covering the semiconductor industry and new technology trends, with a focus on power electronics and power management. He also reports on the business behind electrical engineering, including the electronics supply chain. He joined Electronic Design in 2015 and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
Andy TurudicAndy Turudic
Technology Editor, Electronic Design
Andy Turudic is a Technology Editor for Electronic Design Magazine, primarily covering Analog and Mixed-Signal circuits and devices and also is Editor of ED's bi-weekly Automotive Electronics newsletter.
He holds a Bachelor's in EE from the University of Windsor (Ontario Canada) and has been involved in electronics, semiconductors, and gearhead stuff, for a bit over a half century. Andy also enjoys teaching his engineerlings at Portland Community College as a part-time professor in their EET program.
"AndyT" brings his multidisciplinary engineering experience from companies that include National Semiconductor (now Texas Instruments), Altera (Intel), Agere, Zarlink, TriQuint,(now Qorvo), SW Bell (managing a research team at Bellcore, Bell Labs and Rockwell Science Center), Bell-Northern Research, and Northern Telecom.
After hours, when he's not working on the latest invention to add to his portfolio of 16 issued US patents, or on his DARPA Challenge drone entry, he's lending advice and experience to the electric vehicle conversion community from his mountain lair in the Pacific Northwet[sic].
AndyT's engineering blog, "Nonlinearities," publishes the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month. Andy's OpEd may appear at other times, with fair warning given by the Vu meter pic. His cartoon series, "Inventors", appears each week in Electronic Design Weekly.
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