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posted by on Friday December 02 2016, @10:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-a-mint-julep-on-the-veranda dept.

Bumpy surfaces with graphene between would help dissipate heat in next-generation microelectronic devices, according to Rice University scientists.

Their theoretical studies show that enhancing the interface between gallium nitride semiconductors and diamond heat sinks would allow phonons – quasiparticles of sound that also carry heat – to disperse more efficiently. Heat sinks are used to carry heat away from electronic devices.

Rice computer models replaced the flat interface between the materials with a nanostructured pattern and added a layer of graphene, the atom-thick form of carbon, as a way to dramatically improve heat transfer, said Rice materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari.

The new work by Shahsavari, Rice graduate student and lead author Lei Tao and postdoctoral researcher Sreeprasad Sreenivasan appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

No matter the size, electronic devices need to disperse the heat they produce, Shahsavari said. "With the current trend of constant increases in power and device miniaturization, efficient heat management has become a serious issue for reliability and performance," he said. "Oftentimes, the individual materials in hybrid nano- and microelectronic devices function well but the interface of different materials is the bottleneck for heat diffusion."

It would help, theoretically.


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  • (Score: 2) by dlb on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:20AM

    by dlb (4790) on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:20AM (#436387)
    MIT News: [mit.edu]

    ...heat — as well as sound — is actually the motion or vibration of atoms and molecules: Low-frequency vibrations correspond to sound, while higher frequencies correspond to heat. At each frequency, quantum mechanics principles dictate that the vibrational energy must be a multiple of a basic amount of energy, called a quantum, that is proportional to the frequency. Physicists call these basic levels of energy phonons.

    Apparently, as computing shrinks toward the quantum level, the chaotic motion of heat particles (phonons) makes it hard to control the flow of heat out of crystals (i.e. a computer chip). On the flip side, if phonon motion could be blocked while allowing electron flow, it would come in handy designing thermoelectric devices that generate electricity from temperature differences.

    According to the article, sometimes phonons are the "...good guys, and sometimes they’re bad guys."

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