Materials opportunities and challenges for low-energy computing: Thermal management and interconnects
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Energy Sector Analysis
Emerging materials with promising thermal properties might help improve heat management in nextgeneration electronics.
Materials opportunities and challenges for low-energy computing: Thermal management and interconnects By Prachi Patel Feature Editor: Subhash L. Shinde
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s the world came to a standstill in the grip of a pandemic, society’s reliance on digital technologies became more apparent than ever. Millions connected to live meetings from home, schools went to online platforms, and video streaming soared. The energy use of cars, airplanes, and office buildings might have plummeted, yet that of server farms skyrocketed. Data centers are notoriously energy-intensive, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building, according to the US Department of Energy. Today, they account for about 1% of the world’s electrical energy use. But as Internet and personal device use grows, the energy use and emissions of the information and communications technologies (ICT) industry could explode. The future is uncertain, but in one worst-case modeled scenario, ICT could gobble up more than 20% of global electricity by 2030, with data centers using more than a third of that. Shrinking silicon transistors and packing them more densely on chips has led to faster, cheaper, and more powerful computing. These high-performance chips are also power-hungry. New materials technologies could enable devices and memory that use less energy (see the Energy Quarterly section in the March 2020 issue of MRS Bulletin, doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2020.70). But high-power computing creates another set of challenges. One is the generation of blistering temperatures that require energy-consuming cooling techniques. The other is the immense energy cost to move data around chips via interconnects. The industry has relied for decades on good old copper for both heat dispersion and interconnects. Copper is hard to beat when it comes to thermal and electrical conductivity. Better materials such as silver and diamond are prohibitively expensive. Now more than ever, there is a need for novel materials to help tackle thermal management and interconnect challenges. Besides making laptops uncomfortable to use, overheated chips are slow, unreliable, and sap battery life. “Manufacturers literally have to throttle performance so you won’t exhaust the battery in a few hours or burn your knee,” said Eric Pop, a professor of electrical engineering and materials science and engineering at Stanford University. And managing heat at the single transistor, chip, and package level can influence cooling needs all the way up to data centers. “Historical data show that something like half the energy consumption of data centers deals with cooling,” said Pop.
For mobile devices, Samsung and others have introduced copper heat pipes that siphon heat away from the hot central processing unit (CPU). Water in the copper pipe evaporates near the hot CPU, the vapor migrates to the opposite end of the pipe where it
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