The only thing these two news items have in common is their focus on cooling down electronic devices. Well, there’s also the fact that the work is being done at the nanoscale.

First, there’s a Jan. 23, 2014 news item on Azonano about a technique using carbon nanotubes to cool down microprocessors,

“Cool it!” That’s a prime directive for microprocessor chips and a promising new solution to meeting this imperative is in the offing. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a “process friendly” technique that would enable the cooling of microprocessor chips through carbon nanotubes.

Frank Ogletree, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, led a study in which organic molecules were used to form strong covalent bonds between carbon nanotubes and metal surfaces. This improved by six-fold the flow of heat from the metal to the carbon nanotubes, paving the way for faster, more efficient cooling of computer chips. The technique is done through gas vapor or liquid chemistry at low temperatures, making it suitable for the manufacturing of computer chips.

The Jan. 22, 2014 Berkeley Lab news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the nature  of the problem in more detail,

Overheating is the bane of microprocessors. As transistors heat up, their performance can deteriorate to the point where they no longer function as transistors. With microprocessor chips becoming more densely packed and processing speeds continuing to increase, the overheating problem looms ever larger. The first challenge is to conduct heat out of the chip and onto the circuit board where fans and other techniques can be used for cooling. Carbon nanotubes have demonstrated exceptionally high thermal conductivity but their use for cooling microprocessor chips and other devices has been hampered by high thermal interface resistances in nanostructured systems.

“The thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes exceeds that of diamond or any other natural material but because carbon nanotubes are so chemically stable, their chemical interactions with most other materials are relatively weak, which makes for  high thermal interface resistance,” Ogletree says. “Intel came to the Molecular Foundry wanting to improve the performance of carbon nanotubes in devices. Working with Nachiket Raravikar and Ravi Prasher, who were both Intel engineers when the project was initiated, we were able to increase and strengthen the contact between carbon nanotubes and the surfaces of other materials. This reduces thermal resistance and substantially improves heat transport efficiency.”

The news release then describes the proposed solution,

Sumanjeet Kaur, lead author of the Nature Communications paper and an expert on carbon nanotubes, with assistance from co-author and Molecular Foundry chemist Brett Helms, used reactive molecules to bridge the carbon nanotube/metal interface – aminopropyl-trialkoxy-silane (APS) for oxide-forming metals, and cysteamine for noble metals. First vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays were grown on silicon wafers, and thin films of aluminum or gold were evaporated on glass microscope cover slips. The metal films were then “functionalized” and allowed to bond with the carbon nanotube arrays. Enhanced heat flow was confirmed using a characterization technique developed by Ogletree that allows for interface-specific measurements of heat transport.

“You can think of interface resistance in steady-state heat flow as being an extra amount of distance the heat has to flow through the material,” Kaur says. “With carbon nanotubes, thermal interface resistance adds something like 40 microns of distance on each side of the actual carbon nanotube layer. With our technique, we’re able to decrease the interface resistance so that the extra distance is around seven microns at each interface.”

Although the approach used by Ogletree, Kaur and their colleagues substantially strengthened the contact between a metal and individual carbon nanotubes within an array, a majority of the nanotubes within the array may still fail to connect with the metal. The Berkeley team is now developing a way to improve the density of carbon nanotube/metal contacts. Their technique should also be applicable to single and multi-layer graphene devices, which face the same cooling issues.

For anyone who’s never heard of the Molecular Foundry before (from the news release),

The Molecular Foundry is one of five DOE [Department of Energy] Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs), national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale, supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize, and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

My second item comes from the University of Buffalo (UB), located in the US. From a Jan. 21, 2014 University of Buffalo news release by Cory Nealon (also on EurekAlert),

Heat in electronic devices is generated by the movement of electrons through transistors, resistors and other elements of an electrical network. Depending on the network, there are a variety of ways, such as cooling fans and heat sinks, to prevent the circuits from overheating.

But as more integrated circuits and transistors are added to devices to boost their computing power, it’s becoming more difficult to keep those elements cool. Most nanoelectrics research centers are working to develop advanced materials that are capable of withstanding the extreme environment inside smartphones, laptops and other devices.

While advanced materials show tremendous potential, the UB research suggests there may still be room within the existing paradigm of electronic devices to continue developing more powerful computers.

To support their findings, the researchers fabricated nanoscale semiconductor devices in a state-of-the-art gallium arsenide crystal provided to UB by Sandia’s Reno [John L. Reno, Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories]. The researchers then subjected the chip to a large voltage, squeezing an electrical current through the nanoconductors. This, in turn, increased the amount of heat circulating through the chip’s nanotransistor.

But instead of degrading the device, the nanotransistor spontaneously transformed itself into a quantum state that was protected from the effect of heating and provided a robust channel of electric current. To help explain, Bird [Jonathan Bird, UB professor of electrical engineering] offered an analogy to Niagara Falls.

“The water, or energy, comes from a source; in this case, the Great Lakes. It’s channeled into a narrow point (the Niagara River) and ultimately flows over Niagara Falls. At the bottom of waterfall is dissipated energy. But unlike the waterfall, this dissipated energy recirculates throughout the chip and changes how heat affects, or in this case doesn’t affect, the network’s operation.”

While this behavior may seem unusual, especially conceptualizing it in terms of water flowing over a waterfall, it is the direct result of the quantum mechanical nature of electronics when viewed on the nanoscale. The current is made up of electrons which spontaneously organize to form a narrow conducting filament through the nanoconductor. It is this filament that is so robust against the effects of heating.

“We’re not actually eliminating the heat, but we’ve managed to stop it from affecting the electrical network. In a way, this is an optimization of the current paradigm,” said Han [J. E. Han, UB Dept. of Physics], who developed the theoretical models which explain the findings.

What an interesting and counter-intuitive approach to managing the heat in our devices.

For those who want more, here’s a link to and citation for the carbon nanotube paper,

Enhanced thermal transport at covalently functionalized carbon nanotube array interfaces by Sumanjeet Kaur, Nachiket Raravikar, Brett A. Helms, Ravi Prasher, & D. Frank Ogletree. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 3082 doi:10.1038/ncomms4082 Published 22 January 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

Now here’s a link to and a citation for the ‘making it hotter to make it cooler’ paper,

Formation of a protected sub-band for conduction in quantum point contacts under extreme biasing by J. Lee, J. E. Han, S. Xiao, J. Song, J. L. Reno, & J. P. Bird. Nature Nanotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nnano.2013.297 Published online 19 January 2014

This paper is behind a paywall although there is an option to preview it for free via ReadCube Access.