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The continued growth and development of the semiconductor industry
has relied primarily on the exponential increase in the density
of solid-state integrated circuits. Decreasing the feature size
of the unit transistor has allowed a dramatic improvement of the
overall circuit performance and an equally significant reduction
of cost per manufactured component. Moore's law has described this
as an exponential growth with a doubling of transistor numbers every
18 months. Although such an exponential trend cannot continue indefinitely
due to fundamental limits imposed by basic physics and technology,
such barriers have to date been overcome by innovations. The dissipation
of energy into heat has long been recognized as an issue that might
limit information processing. Now, however, it seems this is the
barrier that is the most difficult to break.
The graph shows how power density has been the decisive factor
to end the development of bipolar transistors in favor of the CMOS
technology, which resulted in devices with 3× lower peak performance
but 15× lower power density. The red-green trend therefore
remains hypothetical but highly desirable. Unfortunately there is
no mature technology at this time that would allow a switch similar
to the one developed fifteen years ago. For this reason, it seems
only possible for innovations to limit the strong exponential growth
of power density such that the power dissipations can be handled
from innovations coming from thermal management research (red arrow).
The explosion of power density causes an increase in size of cooling
equipment that is opposed to the general trend of shrinking sizes
of electronic components. With improved cooling concepts we can
break this trend and introduce coolers that are much smaller than
those relying on conventional approaches.
» Back to High-performance
thermal interfaces
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