The Heat Conduction Renaissance

Abstract

Some of the most exciting recent advancements in heat conduction physics have been motivated, enabled, or achieved by the thermal management community that ITherm serves so effectively. In this paper we highlight the resulting renaissance in basic heat conduction research, which is linked to cooling challenges from power transistors to portables. Examples include phonon transport and scattering in nanotransistors, engineered high-conductivity composites, modulated conductivity through phase transitions, as well as the surprising transport properties of low-dimensional (1D and 2D) nanomaterials. This work benefits strongly from decades of collaboration and leadership from the semiconductor industry.

Applications and Impacts of Nanoscale Thermal Transport in Electronics Packaging

“…These interfaces are designed to optimize the electrical performances without considering thermal management at the same time. As characteristic length-and time-scales become comparable to the mean-free-paths and lifetimes of energy carriers in materials and devices, thermal resistance associated with interfaces between solids can become a major impediment and may lead to thermal breakdown of devices if heat cannot be dissipated efficiently [221]. R th is sometimes comparable to (or even larger than) the thermal resistance of materials, thus contributing significantly to the overall resistance of the whole device.…”

Anisotropic Thermal Boundary Resistance across 2D Black Phosphorus: Experiment and Atomistic Modeling of Interfacial Energy Transport

“…With the continuous miniaturization of modern electronic devices, power density increases dramatically in nanoscale chips and heat dissipation becomes a key technological challenge for the semiconductor industry [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . Intensive efforts have been devoted to thermal management including the recent development of new semiconductor materials with ultrahigh thermal conductivity, such as cubic boron phosphide (~500 W/mK) [8] and boron arsenide (~ 1300 W/mK) [7,13,14] .…”

“…Intensive efforts have been devoted to thermal management including the recent development of new semiconductor materials with ultrahigh thermal conductivity, such as cubic boron phosphide (~500 W/mK) [8] and boron arsenide (~ 1300 W/mK) [7,13,14] . In parallel to heat transfer in homogenous materials, heat dissipation in high power devices can also be severely limited by the near-junction thermal resistance across heterogeneous interfaces, i.e., the thermal boundary resistance (TBR) [1,2,4,12,15] . On the other hand, thermal isolation applications, such as jet engine turbines require interfaces with large TBR and high temperature stability [16] .…”

“…In NBC-DMM, the transmission coefficient was calculated for longitudinal acoustic (LA) branches and transversely acoustic (TA) branches separately by using Eqn. (4).…”

Ab Initio Modeling of Thermal Transport through van der Waals Materials

“…The increased power density of these devices combined with high thermal dissipation and dramatic peak temperatures, severely limit their reliability, performance and lifetime [4], [5]. Another critical issue is self-or Joule-heating, a phenomenon caused by the phonon emission of high energy electrons [6]. Instead of eliminating thermal fluctuations several research efforts have tried to take advantage of nanoscale systems to recycle the waste heat through Seebeck's effect [7], [8].…”