At the moment’s beautiful computing energy is permitting us to maneuver from human intelligence towards synthetic intelligence. And as our machines acquire extra energy, they’re changing into not simply instruments however decision-makers shaping our future.
However with nice energy comes nice…warmth!
As nanometer-scale transistors change at gigahertz speeds, electrons race by circuits, dropping power as warmth—which you’re feeling when your laptop computer or your cellphone toasts your fingers. As we’ve crammed increasingly transistors onto chips, we’ve misplaced the room to launch that warmth effectively. As a substitute of the warmth spreading out rapidly throughout the silicon, which makes it a lot simpler to take away, it builds as much as type scorching spots, which might be tens of levels hotter than the remainder of the chip. That excessive warmth forces programs to throttle the efficiency of CPUs and GPUs to keep away from degrading the chips.
In different phrases, what started as a quest for miniaturization has was a battle towards thermal power. This problem extends throughout all electronics. In computing, high-performance processors demand ever-increasing energy densities. (New Nvidia GPU B300 servers will eat almost 15 kilowatts of energy.) In communication, each digital and analog programs push transistors to ship extra energy for stronger alerts and sooner information charges. Within the energy electronics used for power conversion and distribution, effectivity good points are being countered by thermal constraints.
The power to develop large-grained polycrystalline diamond at low temperature led to a brand new solution to fight warmth in transistors. Mohamadali Malakoutian
Moderately than permitting warmth to construct up, what if we might unfold it out proper from the beginning, contained in the chip?—diluting it like a cup of boiling water dropped right into a swimming pool. Spreading out the warmth would decrease the temperature of essentially the most essential gadgets and circuits and let the opposite time-tested cooling applied sciences work extra effectively. To do this, we’d need to introduce a extremely thermally conductive materials contained in the IC, mere nanometers from the transistors, with out messing up any of their very exact and delicate properties. Enter an surprising materials—diamond.
In some methods, diamond is right. It’s one of the thermally conductive supplies on the planet—many occasions extra environment friendly than copper—but it’s additionally electrically insulating. Nonetheless, integrating it into chips is difficult: Till not too long ago we knew how you can develop it solely at circuit-slagging temperatures in extra of 1,000 °C.
However my analysis group at Stanford College has managed what appeared inconceivable. We will now develop a type of diamond appropriate for spreading warmth, straight atop semiconductor gadgets at low sufficient temperatures that even essentially the most delicate interconnects inside superior chips will survive. To be clear, this isn’t the type of diamond you see in jewellery, which is a big single crystal. Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating not more than a few micrometers thick.
The potential advantages could possibly be large. In a few of our earliest gallium-nitride radio-frequency transistors, the addition of diamond dropped the machine temperature by greater than 50 °C. On the decrease temperature, the transistors amplified X-band radio alerts 5 occasions in addition to earlier than. We expect our diamond shall be much more vital for superior CMOS chips. Researchers predict that upcoming chipmaking applied sciences might make scorching spots nearly 10 °C hotter [see , “Future Chips Will Be Hotter Than Ever”, in this issue]. That’s in all probability why our analysis is drawing intense curiosity from the chip trade, together with Utilized Supplies, Samsung, and TSMC. If our work continues to succeed because it has, warmth will turn out to be a far much less onerous constraint in CMOS and different electronics too.
The place Warmth Begins and Ends in Chips
On the boundary between the diamond and the semiconductor, a skinny layer of silicon carbide varieties. It acts as a bridge for warmth to move into the diamond. Mohamadali Malakoutian
Warmth begins inside transistors and the interconnects that hyperlink them, because the move of present meets resistance. Meaning most of it’s generated close to the floor of the semiconductor substrate. From there it rises both by layers of steel and insulation or by the semiconductor itself, relying on the bundle structure. The warmth then encounters a thermal interface materials designed to unfold it out earlier than it finally reaches a warmth sink, a radiator, or some kind of liquid cooling, the place air or fluid carries the warmth away.
The dominant cooling methods at the moment focus on advances in warmth sinks, followers, and radiators. In pursuit of even higher cooling, researchers have explored liquid cooling utilizing microfluidic channels and eradicating warmth utilizing phase-change supplies. Some laptop clusters go as far as to submerge the servers in thermally conductive, dielectric—electrically insulating—liquids.
These improvements are essential steps ahead, however they nonetheless have limitations. Some are so costly they’re worthwhile just for the highest-performing chips; others are just too cumbersome for the job. (Your smartphone can’t carry a standard fan.) And none are more likely to be very efficient as we transfer towards chip architectures resembling silicon skyscrapers that stack a number of layers of chips. Such 3D programs are solely as viable as our capacity to take away warmth from each layer inside it.
The large downside is that chip supplies are poor warmth conductors, so the warmth turns into trapped and concentrated, inflicting the temperature to skyrocket inside the chip. At greater temperatures, transistors leak extra present, losing energy; they age extra rapidly, too.
Warmth spreaders enable the warmth to maneuver laterally, diluting it and permitting the circuits to chill. However they’re positioned far—comparatively, in fact—from the place the warmth is generated, and they also’re of little assist with these scorching spots. We’d like a heat-spreading expertise that may exist inside nanometers of the place the warmth is generated. That is the place our new low-temperature diamond could possibly be important.
How you can Make Diamonds
Earlier than my lab turned to growing diamond as a heat-spreading materials, we have been engaged on it as a semiconductor. In its single-crystal type—like the type in your finger—it has a huge bandgap and skill to face up to monumental electrical fields. Single-crystalline diamond additionally presents a few of the highest thermal conductivity recorded in any materials, reaching 2,200 to 2,400 watts per meter per kelvin—roughly six occasions as conductive as copper. Polycrystalline diamond—a better to make materials—can method these values when grown thick. Even on this type, it outperforms copper.
As enticing as diamond transistors is likely to be, I used to be keenly conscious—primarily based on my expertise researching gallium nitride gadgets—of the lengthy street forward. The issue is one among scale. A number of corporations are working to scale high-purity diamond substrates to 50, 75, and even 100 millimeters however the diamond substrates we might purchase commercially have been solely about 3 mm throughout.
Gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistors have been a really perfect check case for diamond cooling. The gadgets are 3D and the essential heat-generating half, the two-dimensional electron gasoline, is near the floor. Chris Philpot
So we determined as a substitute to strive rising diamond movies on giant silicon wafers, within the hope of shifting towards commercial-scale diamond substrates. Basically, that is achieved by reacting methane and hydrogen at excessive temperatures, 900 °C or extra. This ends in not a single crystal however a forest of slender columns. As they develop taller, the nanocolumns coalesce right into a uniform movie, however by the point they type high-quality polycrystalline diamond, the movie is already very thick. This thick development provides stress to the fabric and sometimes results in cracking and different issues.
However what if we used this polycrystalline coating as a warmth spreader for different gadgets? If we might get diamond to develop inside nanometers of transistors, get it to unfold warmth each vertically and laterally, and combine it seamlessly with the silicon, steel, and dielectric in chips, it’d do the job.
There have been good causes to assume it could work. Diamond is electrically insulating, and it has a comparatively low dielectric fixed. Meaning it makes a poor capacitor, so alerts despatched by diamond-encrusted interconnects may not degrade a lot. Thus diamond might act as a “thermal dielectric,” one that’s electrically insulating however thermally conducting.
Polycrystalline diamond might assist cut back temperatures inside 3D chips. Diamond thermal vias would develop inside micrometers-deep holes so warmth can move from vertically from one chip to a diamond warmth spreader in one other chip that’s stacked atop it. Dennis Wealthy
For our plan to work, we have been going to need to study to develop diamond in a different way. We knew there wasn’t room to develop a thick movie inside a chip. We additionally knew the slender, spiky crystal pillars made within the first a part of the expansion course of don’t transmit warmth laterally very properly, so we’d have to develop large-grained crystals from the begin to get the warmth shifting horizontally. A 3rd downside was that the present diamond movies didn’t type a coating on the edges of gadgets, which might be vital for inherently 3D gadgets. However the greatest obstacle was the excessive temperature wanted to develop the diamond movie, which might harm, if not destroy, an IC’s circuits. We have been going to have to chop the expansion temperature a minimum of in half.
Simply reducing the temperature doesn’t work. (We tried: You wind up, mainly, with soot, which is electrically conductive—the other of what’s wanted.) We discovered that including oxygen to the combination helped, as a result of it constantly etched away carbon deposits that weren’t diamond. And thru intensive experimentation, we have been capable of finding a formulation that produced coatings of large-grained polycrystalline diamond throughout gadgets at 400 °C, which is a survivable temperature for CMOS circuits and different gadgets.
Thermal Boundary Resistance
Though we had discovered a solution to develop the correct of diamond coatings, we confronted one other essential problem—the phonon bottleneck, often known as thermal boundary resistance (TBR). Phonons are packets of warmth power, in the way in which that photons are packets of electromagnetic power. Particularly, they’re a quantized model of the vibration of a crystal lattice. These phonons can pile up on the boundary between supplies, resisting the move of warmth. Decreasing TBR has lengthy been a aim in thermal interface engineering, and it’s usually achieved by introducing completely different supplies on the boundary. However semiconductors are suitable solely with sure supplies, limiting our selections.
Thermal scaffolding would hyperlink layers of heat-spreading polycrystalline diamond in a single chip to these in one other chip in a 3D-stacked silicon. The thermal pillars would traverse every chip’s interconnects and dielectric materials to maneuver warmth vertically by the stack. Srabanti Chowdhury
Ultimately, we acquired fortunate. Whereas rising diamond on GaN capped with silicon nitride, we noticed one thing surprising: The measured TBR was a lot decrease than prior stories led us to anticipate. (The low TBR was independently measured, initially by Martin Kuball on the College of Bristol, in England, and later by Samuel Graham Jr., then at Georgia Tech, who each have been coauthors and collaborators in a number of of our papers.)
By way of additional investigation of the interface science and engineering, and in collaboration with Ok.J. Cho on the College of Texas at Dallas, we recognized the reason for the decrease TBR. Intermixing on the interface between the diamond and silicon nitride led to the formation of silicon carbide, which acted as a type of bridge for the phonons, permitting extra environment friendly warmth switch. Although this started as a scientific discovery, its technological influence was quick—with a silicon carbide interface, our gadgets exhibited considerably improved thermal efficiency.
GaN HEMTs: The First Check Case
We started testing our new low-TBR diamond coatings in gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). These gadgets amplify RF alerts by controlling present by a two-dimensional electron gasoline that varieties inside its channel. We leveraged the pioneering analysis on HEMTs achieved by Umesh Mishra’s laboratory on the College of California, Santa Barbara, the place I had been a graduate pupil. The Mishra lab invented a specific type of the fabric known as N-polar gallium nitride. Their N-polar GaN HEMTs display distinctive energy density at excessive frequencies, significantly within the W-band, the 75- to 110-gigahertz a part of the microwave spectrum.
What made these HEMTs such a great check case is one defining function of the machine: The gate, which controls the move of present by the machine, is inside tens of nanometers of the transistor’s channel. That implies that warmth is generated very near the floor of the machine, and any interference our diamond coating might trigger would rapidly present within the machine’s operation.
We launched the diamond layer in order that it surrounded the HEMT fully, even on the edges. By sustaining a development temperature beneath 400 °C, we hoped to protect core machine performance. Whereas we did see some decline in high-frequency efficiency, the thermal advantages have been substantial—channel temperatures dropped by a exceptional 70 °C. This breakthrough could possibly be a doubtlessly transformative resolution for RF programs, permitting them to function at greater energy than ever earlier than.
Diamond in CMOS
We questioned if our diamond layer might additionally work in high-power CMOS chips. My colleagues at Stanford, H.-S. Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, have lengthy championed 3D-stacked chip architectures. In CMOS computing chips, 3D stacking seems to be essentially the most viable approach ahead to extend integration density, enhance efficiency, and overcome the constraints of conventional transistor scaling. It’s already utilized in some superior AI chips, corresponding to AMD’s MI300 sequence. And it’s established within the high-bandwidth reminiscence chips that pump information by Nvidia GPUs and different AI processors. The a number of layers of silicon in these 3D stacks are largely related by microscopic balls of solder, or in some superior instances simply by their copper terminals. Getting alerts and energy out of those stacks requires vertical copper hyperlinks that burrow by the silicon to succeed in the chip bundle’s substrate.
In one among our discussions, Mitra identified {that a} essential concern with 3D-stacked chips is the thermal bottlenecks that type inside the stack. In 3D architectures, the normal warmth sinks and different methods used for 2D chips aren’t ample. Extracting warmth from every layer is crucial.
Our analysis might redefine thermal administration throughout industries.
Our experiments on thermal boundary resistance in GaN urged an identical method would work in silicon. And after we built-in diamond with silicon, the outcomes have been exceptional: An interlayer of silicon carbide fashioned, resulting in diamond with a wonderful thermal interface.
Our effort launched the idea of thermal scaffolding. In that scheme, nanometers-thick layers of polycrystalline diamond could be built-in inside the dielectric layers above the transistors to unfold warmth. These layers would then be related by vertical warmth conductors, known as thermal pillars, fabricated from copper or extra diamond. These pillars would join to a different warmth spreader, which in flip would hyperlink to thermal pillars on the subsequent chip within the 3D stack, and so forth till the warmth reached the warmth sink or different cooling machine.
The extra tiers of computing silicon in a 3D chip, the larger distinction thermal scaffolding makes. An AI accelerator with greater than 5 tiers would properly exceed typical temperature limits except the scaffolding was employed. Srabanti Chowdhury
In a collaboration with Mitra, we used simulations of warmth generated by actual computational workloads to function a proof-of-concept construction. This construction consisted of dummy heaters to imitate scorching spots in a two-chip stack together with diamond warmth spreaders and copper thermal pillars. Utilizing this, we decreased the temperature to one-tenth its worth with out the scaffolding.
There are hurdles nonetheless to beat. Particularly, we nonetheless have to determine a solution to make the highest of our diamond coatings atomically flat. However, in collaboration with trade companions and researchers, we’re systematically finding out that downside and different scientific and technological points. We and our companions assume this analysis might provide a disruptive new path for thermal administration and an important step towards sustaining high-performance computing into the longer term.
Growing Diamond Thermal Options
We now intend to maneuver towards trade integration. For instance, we’re working with the Protection Superior Analysis Initiatives Company Threads program, which goals to make use of device-level thermal administration to develop extremely environment friendly and dependable X-band energy amplifiers with an influence density 6 to eight occasions as environment friendly as at the moment’s gadgets. This system, which was conceived and initially run by Tom Kazior, is a essential platform for validating the usage of low-temperature diamond integration in GaN HEMT manufacturing. It’s enabled us to collaborate intently with trade groups whereas defending each our and our companions’ processes. Protection purposes demand distinctive reliability, and our diamond-integrated HEMTs are present process rigorous testing with trade companions. The early outcomes are promising, guiding refinements in development processes and integration methods that we’ll make with our companions over the subsequent two years.
However our imaginative and prescient extends past GaN HEMTs to different supplies and significantly silicon computational chips. For the latter, we have now a longtime collaboration with TSMC, and we’re increasing on newer alternatives with Utilized Supplies, Micron, Samsung, and others by the Stanford SystemX Alliance and the Semiconductor Analysis Corp. That is a rare stage of collaboration amongst in any other case fierce rivals. However then, warmth is a common problem in chip manufacturing, and everyone seems to be motivated to seek out the most effective options.
If profitable, our analysis might redefine thermal administration throughout industries. In my work on gallium nitride gadgets, I’ve seen firsthand how once-radical concepts like this transition to turn out to be trade requirements, and I consider diamond-based warmth extraction will observe the identical trajectory, changing into a essential enabler for a technology of electronics that’s not hindered by warmth.
This text seems within the November 2025 print concern as “Diamond Blankets Will Chill Future Chips.”
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