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As electronics get steadily smaller and denser, they also get hotter. Their components do not function best at high temperatures, so dealing with the escalating heat that colliding electrons produce as they flow through the semiconductors in these shrinking items is a huge\u2014and increasingly pressing\u2014technological challenge.<\/p>\n
There are various ways to chill components, ranging from simple fan-cooled heat exchangers to more compact and sophisticated systems. One of the latter involves equipping semiconductor chips with a tiny device that has fluid-carrying microchannels running through it to move heat away. These channels must be as small as possible so that more of them can fit on a single chip. But the smaller the channels, the more pressure is needed for the liquid to flow\u2014and this pressure can require a lot of energy.<\/p>\n
Now scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) say they have developed a new technology to make such systems more energy-efficient. In this novel approach, the microchannel network\u2014whose architectural design was inspired by the human circulatory system\u2014was built within the semiconductor itself, not attached to it afterward. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n Elison Matioli, a professor at the Institute of Electrical Engineering at EPFL, and his colleagues used a chip comprising a thin layer of a semiconducting material called gallium nitride, or GaN, atop a thicker silicon substrate. In an ordinary chip, this substrate just supports the GaN layer. But in the new system, the microchannels are carved within the substrate and positioned to line up exactly with the parts of the chip that tend to heat up the most.<\/p>\n