But my research group at Stanford University has managed what seemed impossible. We can now grow a form of diamond suitable for spreading heat, directly atop semiconductor devices at low enough temperatures that even the most delicate interconnects inside advanced chips will survive. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of diamond you see in jewelry, which is a large single crystal. Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating no more than a couple of micrometers thick.
The potential benefits could be huge. In some of our earliest gallium-nitride radio-frequency transistors, the addition of diamond dropped the device temperature by more than 50 °C. At the lower temperature, the transistors amplified X-band radio signals five times as well as before. We think our diamond will be even more important for advanced CMOS chips. Researchers predict that upcoming chipmaking technologies could make hot spots almost 10 °C hotter [see , “Future Chips Will Be Hotter Than Ever”, in this issue]. That’s probably why our research is drawing intense interest from the chip industry, including Applied Materials, Samsung, and TSMC. If our work continues to succeed as it has, heat will become a far less onerous constraint in CMOS and other electronics too.
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