What if you could take the benefits of solid-state speaker drivers — specifically, their extreme thinness and lack of moving parts — and bring them to cooling fans? That's what xMEMS aims to ...

Engineers at Thorrn Micro Technologies have created a solid state fan for portable gadgets that is one-fourth the size and two to three times more powerful than a comparable mechanical fan.

Since it's a solid-state device, there aren't any moving parts like rotors or fins to fail, and its thin design means it can be placed directly atop heat-generating components like APUs and GPUs.