Perfect Cooling for Faster Microprocessors with Carbon Nanotubes

First Posted: Jan 27, 2014 04:09 PM EST
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Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a factory ready technique that would use carbon nanotubes to better cool microprocessor chips.

The missing link, strong covalent bonds between carbon nanotubes and metal surfaces, was invented by Frank Ogletree, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led a study in using organic molecules to form these bonds.

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.

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.

“We’ve developed covalent bond pathways that work for oxide-forming metals, such as aluminum and silicon, and for more noble metals, such as gold and copper,” says Ogletree, who serves as a staff engineer for the Imaging Facility at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience center hosted by Berkeley Lab. “In both cases the mechanical adhesion improved so that surface bonds were strong enough to pull a carbon nanotube array off of its growth substrate and significantly improve the transport of heat across the interface.”

Ogletree is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in Nature Communications.

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.

“Part of our mission at the Molecular Foundry is to help develop solutions for technology problems posed to us by industrial users that also raise fundamental science questions,” Ogletree says. “In developing this technique to address a real-world technology problem, we also created tools that yield new information on fundamental chemistry.” -- Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Reference:

Sumanjeet Kaur et al., Enhanced thermal transport at covalently functionalized carbon nanotube array interfaces, Nature Communications, 2014, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4082

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