CEO interview: Ventiva’s thin and cool tech
Carl Schlachte, chairman, president and CEO of Ventiva
After over a decade of development, miniature, silent cooling technology was reducing the thickness of laptop designs at the CES 2025 show in Las Vegas this week.
Carl Schlachte, chairman, president and CEO of the developer, Ventiva, is a veteran of the semiconductor industry, having worked at Motorola and ARM before taking over as CEO of UK processor design ARC. Back in 2011 be bought into a small US firm developing an innovative cooling technology.
Now in 2025, Ventiva is showing a proof of concept for its ion cooling technology, replacing the fans in a laptop to show how the thickness of the design could be reduced by several millimetres with the potential to be used in other consumer designs.
“Between Dell, Intel and Ventiva we had 30 engineers working for over a year. This was a serious engineering effort. What was fascinating was that a community formed between the engineers,” he tells eeNews Europe. “This is the thinnest laptop they have ever built, 2mm thinner.”
The technology of the 3mm high ICE9 blower is only one element. The technology for manufacturing and integration into designs has been as challenging. The latest version can address 40W of thermal power, up from 25W in earlier designs, and fits into the space previously occupied by the fan so that the motherboard design does not need to be changed. The control architecture also mimics a fan so that the software also doesn’t need to change.
“A lot of engineering went into making this easy to integrate, and that is hard,” said Schlachte. ”This is the benefit of having been around for a decade. We go out, test things in the market and go back and re-engineer it. We initially went after spaces that couldn’t be used in the laptop, such as the space around the hinge. Because of how it is built we can turn a corner, and we are not taking any more space. “
“We spent a lot of time with designers to understand that to get great performance you have to rearchitect the design. We were using an existing Lunar Lake motherboard but they were investing in future products for the proof of concept and learning about the modelling and the airflow.”
“The strategic vision I have is that in the next five to seven years, fans will be gone. If you go out to buy a laptop then, everyone will have the same reaction to fans that they had to hard drives that moved to solid state drives.”
“That’s what we are doing right now. We are taking out the existing blowers and putting our blowers in the exact same spot. That’s not the best way to get the best performance out of the system. We take the exact same 4 pin connector and the system thinks it is talking to a fan, and I the system needs more cooling it ramps up just like a fan. The economics clearly point that way by rethinking the thermals just a little bit.
“The blower is a 60 to 70mm long device and we designed it so it can be ganged up like Legos to provide more airflow.”
A proof of concept thin laptop developed by Dell and Intel using the Ventiva ICE9 cooling system
“We use an electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow, energising a very thin wire in the housing, creating the ions that collide with the air to create the air flow. Making this low cost enough for consumer is the challenge, We use no novel materials, no rare earths, we use injection moulded plastics, stamped metal and standard PCB manufacturing with a Microchip microcontroller so its highly scalable,” he said. The company has its own factory in Malaysia and we are getting ready to ramp production by the end of the year along with second sourcing deals. The system that will ship to the laptop makers includes the heat pipe and the fins ready to replace the fan.
“Every piece of the manufacturing flow has been known for 40 years, the novelty went into the development of the software, the control of the power supply and the architecture of the blower to maximise the airflow,” he said.
“I am the only connection back to 2011, the product is different but the basic physics of the idea is the thing that has remained the same. Myself and a partner bought it and scaped it back to bare metal, negotiated partnerships that helped pay for things
“Even 18 months ago we hit a product problem and I thought we were dead so to go from that to yesterday in Intel’s keynote, with Dell people on our booth, is fantastic. We have relationships with all the top PC makers, but Dell is the furthest along. Six to eight months we’ll have more news to share.,” he said. “We’ve spent the bulk of our time working with really smart laptop engineers and our credibility will start to show up in the way these products are developed.”
AI has been a boon for the company, as the higher energy consumption of AI in both the CPU and any accelerators has highlighted the need for more thermal management.
“The general figure of merit for large language models (LLMs) we use is an extra 10W in heat load so what has happened is that their problems have got worse overnight as everyone wants an AI PC that people want to talk to, and fans are loud. To get a blower quieter you have to make it bigger and run it slower. For us, our technology is quiet no matter what. That converged on our technology, a random lovely accident that occurred at a time we had all the tools to tackle it,” he said.
The company also targets the $1000+ market as that has the margin and demand for thinner designs, as well as AI. He points to data that says 94% of the volume of these laptops is between 15W and 40W, hence the 40W proof of concept design shown at CES.
Laptop PCs are just the start, he says.
“We have a counter intuitive view on the world – we don’t see a play for us in the gaming laptop or datacentre. Instead there are more compelling applications on the small side – in a handset, ultrathin tablets, at a certain level there is nothing else that will move air at this size. Giving a handset maker an extra 5W of cooling is unheard of, especially if you add in wireless charging and the more performance requirements of AI.”
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