Many people are well aware of the problem of cooling processors and other chips. As the technological norms of production decrease, the severity of the problem increases, since the energy density increases significantly. how figured out scientists, silicon can improve the efficiency of heat removal only by increasing its isotopic purity. Experiments have shown that the “natural” heat dissipation of chips can be increased up to 2.5 times.
Image Source: Junqiao Wu/Berkeley Lab
how knownall silicon in our nature consists of three stable forms of isotopes: approximately 92% is silicon-28 (28Si), 5% – silicon-2929Si) and 3% silicon-30 (30Si). No one purifies silicon for the production of chips, although early studies have shown that the silicon-28 isotope has the best thermal conductivity among all silicon isotopes, and inclusions of impurities 29Yes it is 30Si are interrupted by heat flows. It was believed that the gain was barely more than 10% with significantly increasing cleaning costs.
Scientists from the National Laboratory. Lawrence at Berkeley set up an experiment, during which they tried to evaluate the degree of influence of silicon cleaning on the heat sink. They connected two thermocouples with 90 nm wide nanowires and measured the heat transfer. It turned out that pure silicon-28 improves the transfer of heat from a heating element to another by 150%, and not by 10%, as previously thought. Upon closer examination, it turned out that the surface of the nanowire was covered with silicon dioxide, which prevented parasitic heat dissipation over the entire surface of the nanowire, and the heat flux was concentrated in its center.
Scientists do not give any recipes for organizing heat removal from chips in a new way. But they showed the possibility of a multiple increase in the efficiency of heat removal from crystals, which will cost candles – the cost of producing isotopically pure silicon for future chips.
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