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Heat is the enemy of high power electronics. As chips continue to shrink, power density has been steadily increasing, and it's becoming more and more difficult to effectively protect chips from heat damage. But researchers at Stanford university have come up with a solution can be baked into silicon itself. According to the researchers, their "heat transistor" can function like a thermostat, switching on and off to protect sensitive areas of a chip. Unlike previous implementations, such a heat transistor layer would only be 10nm thick, work well near room temperature, and allow fine-grained regulation across a chip.
In a more distant future the researchers imagine that thermal transistors could be arranged in circuits to compute using heat logic, much as semiconductor transistors compute using electricity. But while excited by the potential to control heat at the nanoscale, the researchers say this technology is comparable to where the first electronic transistors were some 70 years ago, when even the inventors couldn’t fully envision what they had made possible. "For the first time, however, a practical nanoscale thermal transistor is within reach," Goodson says.
In a more distant future the researchers imagine that thermal transistors could be arranged in circuits to compute using heat logic, much as semiconductor transistors compute using electricity. But while excited by the potential to control heat at the nanoscale, the researchers say this technology is comparable to where the first electronic transistors were some 70 years ago, when even the inventors couldn’t fully envision what they had made possible. "For the first time, however, a practical nanoscale thermal transistor is within reach," Goodson says.
