How the Frore AirJet Could Make Smaller and Thinner Devices Faster

Heat is a limiting factor that prevents us from getting powerful chips on small devices. Even the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s performance drops after several minutes of intense use to prevent heat from damaging it.

Currently, the only way to cool small devices like smartphones and thin-and-light laptops is through passive cooling or a cooling fan. However, the former isn’t suitable for today’s high-power chips, while the latter takes up too much space.

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This is how the Frore AirJet could change that.

What Is the Frore AirJet?

The AirJet Mini and the AirJet Pro are Frore’s reinvention of cooling. Instead of using fans, Frore developed a small thin wafer that can blast air at up to 200 km/h. This device is made up of a copper base to absorb heat, four tiny intakes with paper filters, a flexible printed circuit board to control it, and the exhaust port where the high-speed air goes out.

However, the magic is in how the AirJet moves air—not with a rotary fan or pump, but with technology developed in the late 1800s.

Frore Systems AirJet Pro screenshot

How the Frore AirJet Revolutionizes PC Cooling

When talking about air cooling, most people think of a rotary fan to drive air. However, this has a massive disadvantage: the motor that drives it takes up a lot of space. Since you can only go so small, most rotary fans have already hit a size limit. As of the time of writing, some of the smallest production rotary fans have a 9mm x 9mm x 3mm dimension.

While this is already small, it’s still insufficient for some applications. Furthermore, due to their minuscule size, they cannot drive the required air for high-power chips.

AirJet Mini and AirJet Pro hero image by Frore Systems

Instead of using a rotary fan, Frore uses piezoelectric parts to drive air with their active cooling chip. The company calls the AirJet a “solid-state thermal solution” as there are no visible moving parts, like thedifference between an HDD and an SSD.

Piezoelectricity was discovered in 1880 by the Curie brothers. In essence, it’s a material that generates electricity when mechanical stress is applied to it. Engineers and scientists were able to reverse the process, creating a material that changes its shape with an electrical current.

ZOTAC ZBOX PI430AJ held in a hand

By alternating the current, they were able to create a small device that moves back and forth quickly without the need for a rotary engine—much like the way we use paper fans to cool down on a hot summer day.

Frore Systems talks more about its technology in the video below:

laptop-cooling-mats

How Much Air Can the AirJet Mini Move?

One AirJet Mini, which is 41.5mm x 27.5mm x 2.8mm, can drive 5.95 liters of air in one minute—almost five times more than the 1.17 liters per minute specification ofSunon’s9mm x 9mm x 3mm rotary fan and equal to the volume of air that a 12mm x 12mm x 3mm fan delivers.

It also has a massive 1,750 Pascal of back pressure—powerful enough to suck a lot of air through the crevices of most devices, meaning you don’t need large air intake vents. This reduces the chance of dust and water entry into a computer that uses the AirJet.

According toFrore, a single AirJet Mini can remove 5.25 watts of heat at 21 dB. Although it’s not enough for some high-performance chips like the Intel Core i9-13900K or the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, it will allow you to install a relatively more powerful chip, like the 13th-Generation Intel Core i3 processor in a packagelike an Intel NUCor even smaller.

When Can We See the AirJet on Smartphones and Laptops?

So, if the AirJet is so promising, when can we get it on our devices? The technology launched at Computex 2023 (May 2023), so it will take some time before manufacturers add it to their products.

However, we’ve already seen one prototype from a reputable maker.ZOTAC announcedthe ZBOX PI430AJ mini PC. This machine is based on their ZBOX line of ultra-compact computers, which were limited to Intel Celeron chips because of their small size. But because of the massive cooling that the AirJet delivers, ZOTAC upgraded the ZBOX to a far more powerful Intel Core i3 processor.

Although this is already a working computer, we still don’t know when it will become available. But we’re hoping it’s coming this year.

More Cooling, More Power

Although we’ve seen leaps and bounds in the development of the processor, cooling technology is taking longer to develop. But with the AirJet, air cooling is starting to catch up with the breakneck speed of CPU development.

With the AirJet, we can expect our phones, laptops, and tablets to get even thinner without sacrificing power. But while you’re waiting for this tech to arrive at your doorstep, you should get a laptop cooling mat for more performance from your current laptop.

You could cause serious damage to your laptop if it gets too hot. To prevent this, opt for one of the best laptop cooling mats available today.

It’s not super flashy, but it can help to keep your computer up and running.

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