Nextreme is a startup company which has come up with the idea of integrating peltier cooling into the chip packaging. Based on the principles of the flip-chip packaging method, Nextreme has presented a concept of how to cool a chip with peltier cooling inside of the chip packaging. Flip-chip uses tiny copper pillars on the surface of the die through which the signals (data, power, ground) are sent. The die is flipped over and put into a grid of solder balls, which in turn is connected to the socket. The basic idea is to use some of the copper pillars for cooling instead of signaling.
As you can see on the picture above, the heat is transferred through the mini-peltier and out through a thermal via in the PCB.
It could be used to provide a cooling for the entire chip or balance out the heat coming from specific hot spots. The cooling could be actively controlled and be turned on or off as different parts of the chip become more or less active.
The problem is that the chip has to be built around the packaging from Nextreme. You can’t just take a current chip and adapt it like so, which unfortunately means that the company will most likely be acquired by a chip maker or perhaps a foundry, instead of having it’s technology adapted by others.
You can find a technology overview at Nextreme’s website and peltiers in general at Wikipedia.
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