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Diamond films can save energy by sinking heat of electronic devices

US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently conducted two studies, which revealed a new path for materials scientists to use previously unknown properties of nanocrystalline diamond thin films. The new discovery has made it possible to reduce the ‘thermal budget’ of various types of integrated circuits hence improving their performance significantly. According to Anirudha Sumant, Argonne nanoscientist, engineers have been looking to gain efficiency by reducing the size of the components of electronic devices for decades, but during the process they have reached ‘thermal bottleneck’. In a thermal bottleneck the performance again gets affected due to the undesirable effect caused by the excessive heat generated in the device. Therefore, to suck up the heat until some innovative way isn’t available we are still stuck with this bottleneck.

Diamond brightens the performance of electronic devices

Strangely, diamond thin films have interesting thermal properties that led scientists to propose this material to be used as a heat sink that can be combined with various semiconducting materials. The only limitation is that the temperature of deposition for diamond films normally exceeds 800 degrees Celsius. So the real deal was to produce the diamond films at 400 degrees Celsius and if that is possible then this material can be integrated to whole range of other semiconductor materials.

To do so, Sumant and his colleagues at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials used a new technique that reduced temperature close to 400 degrees Celsius and also tuned the thermal properties by controlling the size of their particle. As a result, it got possible to combine diamond with gallium nitride and graphene, the two other important materials. So far silicon was used for fabricating graphene, but now with graphene fabricated on diamond made graphene devices capable of sustaining higher density of current.

In the other study, the same technology was used to combine the thin films of diamond with gallium nitride that is used widely in high power light emitting devices (LED). During the experiment, when 300 nm thick diamond film was deposited on gallium nitride substrate, Sumant and his colleagues noticed an improvement which he called remarkable as difference of just few degrees within an integrated circuit caused the thermal performance improve considerably.

The processes being crucial for industry, the common link and the reason to conduct these experiments was to find new effective ways that can dissipate heat using less energy overcoming the semiconducting circuits conventional limits and pursuing the next generation electronics.

Via: Anl

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