Startup Frore Systems Inc. has raised $90 million to commercialize its AirJet devices, which cool chips by moving air over them at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour.

The company announced the funding round, a Series C investment, today. It said that Fidelity Management & Research was the lead investor. The round also drew contributions from more than a half-dozen other backers, including Qualcomm Inc.’s venture capital arm.

“Cooling is critical to enable the performance needed to realize the full promise of AI – today and in the future,” said Frore founder and Chief Executive Seshu Madhavapeddy. “Traditional bulky and noisy thermal solutions, like fans, simply don’t meet the challenge.”

Processors generate a significant amount of heat while crunching data. The faster the processor, the higher the temperature. Device manufacturers generally have two ways of dissipating that heat: They can either slow down the processor or add a fan.

Smartphones and many other types of devices can’t accommodate a built-in fan because of space constraints. As a result, manufacturers can only prevent the onboard processor from overheating by limiting its top speed, which hurts the user experience. Frore developed its AirJet devices to address that challenge.

The AirJet is a flat, rectangular air cooling module that weighs as little as eight grams depending on the version. This compact form factor allows it to be installed in devices such as smartphones that don’t have room for a traditional fan. When an AirJet circulates cool air inside its case, a handset doesn’t have to limit its processor to avoid overheating, which boosts application performance.

The AirJet is designed to be placed directly atop a device’s processor. According to Frore, it uses components called piezoelectric membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to create high-velocity jets of air. The gust moves through the AirJet at a speed of up to 124.3 miles per hour, picks up heat from the surface of the processor to which it’s attached, and exits through a vent on the side of the cooling module.

According to Frore, its technology is better than traditional fans at managing a phenomenon known as the boundary layer. This is a layer of slow-moving air that forms directly above processors’ surface when they’re being cooled. It absorbs a sizable percentage of the heat generated by a chip.

Frore says that traditional fans struggle to cool the boundary layer. According to the company, AirJet generates jets of air in a pattern that removes this boundary layer and thereby facilitates more efficient cooling. Another selling point of the module is that it doesn’t generate any noise while doing so: The AirJet is based on a solid-state design without a significant number of moving parts.

Frore will use its Series C funding round to expand its product portfolio. In conjunction with today’s announcement of the raise, the company debuted a new cooling device called the AirJet PAK. It’s available in three editions that feature two, three and five AirJets.

Frore says the device lends itself to cooling Nvidia Corp.’s Jetson Orion compute module, which hardware makers use to power systems such as robots. The most advanced version of the AirJet PAK can remove 25 watts of heat. That makes it suitable for cooling the Jetson Orin NX 16GB, a version of Nvidia’s compute module that can carry out 100 trillion computations per second. 

Image: Frore Systems