Frore AirJet (2023): a fanless chip cools laptops with ultrasonic membranes

For decades laptops shed heat with copper heat pipes and spinning fans, and fanless designs simply throttled under load. Fans are noisy, thick and suck in dust, so San Jose startup Frore Systems, then backed by about $116 million, proposed a third way at CES 2023: a solid-state chip called AirJet that moves air without any rotating part.

AirJet's secret is a cavity filled with membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency. The vibration creates suction — about 1,750 pascals of backpressure, roughly ten times what a fan produces — that pulls air through a dust guard into inlet vents on top of the chip. The air is pushed down at up to 200 km/h onto a copper heat spreader touching the processor, absorbs the heat, and exits sideways. The first AirJet Mini was 2.8mm thick, consumed about 1W and removed roughly 5W of heat at a claimed 21 dBA, and adding chips did not thicken a device, opening thinner, quieter, dustproof designs.

Frore showed the technology at CES 2023, and at Computex 2023 Zotac announced the $499 Zbox PI430AJ, the first commercial AirJet product: a fanless mini-PC with an Intel Core i3 that Zotac said it could not build with passive cooling alone. In side-by-side Furmark runs at Frore's headquarters, the unit without AirJet dropped to about one frame per second while the AirJet model held 9–11 fps and visibly ejected heat, giving reviewers something they could feel and measure rather than just read on a spec sheet.