Ventiva Zoned Cooling Design Enables Targeted Air Cooling for AI Edge Devices

­Ventiva®, a leader in thermal solutions, introduces a new architectural approach to thermal management that can transform how heat is managed in electronic devices. Ventiva's Zoned Cooling™ design uses the company’s ionic cooling technology to position airflow by zone and reduce system impedance, delivering targeted air to specific heat-generating components, such as CPUs, memory, storage, or sensors, rather than pushing air across an entire system.

AI is fundamentally changing system architectures: embedded intelligence, higher sustained workloads, and increased on-device inference are creating hotspots that conventional fan-based cooling solutions cannot efficiently address. As thermal demands outpace the physical limits of mechanical fans, new thermal management approaches are not optional but necessary.

Ventiva’s Zoned Cooling is a ground-up rethinking of system design. Unlike traditional designs that use a fan-based, centralized approach for system cooling, Zoned Cooling uses Ventiva ionic cooling solutions – which are compact, modular, and free of bulky, noisy, rotating components – to deliver targeted cooling. This provides designers with greater flexibility and enables scalable thermal management tailored to specific system needs.  

“Our Zoned Cooling represents a meaningful and much needed step forward for embedded system design,” explains Carl Schlachte, Chairman, President, and CEO, Ventiva. “Instead of relying on a traditional approach to thermal management that moves air broadly across a system, our Zoned Cooling design delivers cooling where it’s needed. This provides design flexibility, modularity, and spatial efficiency, allowing designers to simplify internal layouts, reclaim valuable board space, and reduce reliance on bulky mechanical fans while still meeting the thermal demands of embedded intelligence.”

A Solid-State Alternative to Traditional Fans

Zoned Cooling design is enabled by Ventia’s ionic cooling technology which leverages the principles of electrohydrodynamics (EHD) to create air flow. EHD is a science that intersects physics, engineering, and fluid dynamics to move ionized air molecules within an electric field.

Ventiva’s thermal management subsystem, which is comprised of a Ventiva ionic cooling device, fin stack, and vapor chamber or heat pipe, generates air movement without any moving parts, noise, or vibration. It is a highly modular solution that continuously self-monitors its operation, delivering the airflow a system requires. 

Laptop Platforms as a Validation Environment

Ventiva’s ionic cooling technology has already been validated in high power-density laptop environments, where space and noise constraints are significantly tighter than in larger intelligent edge platforms.

In its AI-ready laptop reference design, Ventiva demonstrated support for a 28 W CPU and 44.3 W total platform power within a sub-16 mm chassis using three 62 mm Ventiva modules arranged in parallel. The architecture reclaims approximately 7,200 mm² of motherboard area by eliminating traditional fan assemblies and repositioning venting to the rear edge.

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