NovoLINC Demonstrates 400 W/cm² Cooling on Warped Silicon with MaxLINC™
MaxLINC™ sustains 400 W/cm² heat flux and 3,300 W total power on production-representative silicon with ~150 µm warpage, demonstrating a path to overcoming a critical thermal barrier for next-generation AI accelerators.
PITTSBURGH, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NovoLINC, a provider of advanced thermal solutions for AI computing, today announced a significant high-power demonstration of its MaxLINC™ thermal interface material, achieving 400 W/cm² uniform heat flux and 3,300 W total power on a production-representative silicon test die with approximately 150 µm of warpage.
The demonstration was conducted using a specialized single-phase direct liquid cooling cold plate from CoolIT, an Ecolab Company. Throughout the test, the complete thermal stack maintained the silicon junction temperature below 90°C, demonstrating MaxLINC's ability to provide highly effective heat transfer even when significant die warpage creates challenging mechanical and thermal interface conditions.
As AI processors move toward higher power and larger package sizes, silicon and package warpage are becoming increasingly important thermal design challenges. Even small variations in flatness can create uneven contact at the interface between the semiconductor and cooling system, increasing thermal resistance and potentially creating localized hot spots.
MaxLINC is engineered to address this challenge through NovoLINC's proprietary nanostructured composite architecture, combining ultra-low thermal resistance with mechanical compliance. The technology is designed to maintain effective thermal contact across non-flat surfaces, enabling efficient heat transfer from high-power semiconductor devices into advanced cooling systems.
"NovoLINC is actively working with companies across single-phase direct liquid cooling, two-phase direct liquid cooling, and immersion cooling," said Dr. Sheng Shen, CTO of NovoLINC. "These results demonstrate a clear thermal roadmap: combining NovoLINC's advanced thermal interface technology with today's and future liquid cooling systems can provide a pathway to enabling advancement of higher-power chips and AI server architectures."
"Data center operators are making long-term infrastructure decisions today, and they need confidence that the cooling they deploy will keep up with future silicon," said Ben Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT™. "Pairing CoolIT's advanced cold plate technology with NovoLINC's MaxLINC shows that single-phase DLC can handle high-heat-flux processors well into the next decade, without the cost and complexity of switching cooling architectures."
The demonstration reached 3,300 W of total device power, highlighting the ability of MaxLINC to address the rapidly increasing thermal demands of next-generation GPUs, CPUs, ASICs, and other AI accelerators.
"AI compute is advancing toward multi-kilowatt processors, but extracting that heat efficiently from increasingly large and mechanically complex packages is becoming one of the industry's most difficult challenges," said Dr. Ning Li, CEO of NovoLINC. "Our goal with MaxLINC is to remove the thermal interface as a limiting factor, and to give chip designers, system designers, and cooling partners greater freedom to push compute performance and power density to the next level."
The 400 W/cm² demonstration builds on NovoLINC's development of MaxLINC for high-performance semiconductor thermal interfaces. The platform is designed for use across the thermal pathway, from direct chip-to-cooling interfaces and chip-to-package heat spreaders to interfaces between packaged devices and cold plates or other advanced cooling hardware.
MaxLINC samples are available for customer evaluation and qualification.
About NovoLINC
NovoLINC is a Pittsburgh-based advanced materials company developing next-generation thermal interface solutions for AI computing and other energy-dense electronic systems. Spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, NovoLINC has developed a proprietary nanostructured materials platform and a scalable manufacturing process designed to overcome thermal bottlenecks in high-performance computing, data centers, automotive electronics, aerospace systems, and power electronics.
NovoLINC works with leading companies across the semiconductor, hyperscaler, AI server OEM/ODM, and cooling systems industries to enable higher computing performance while improving the energy efficiency and sustainability of next-generation computing infrastructure. The company's technology development has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program.
SOURCE NovoLINC, Inc.
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