With support from the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative, Electrical and Computer Engineering Profs. Avik Ghosh and Mircea Stan are conducting research that could lead to the development of computer chips that produce less heat. Such a technology would have an effect on laptops, cell phones and other technological devices, Ghosh said.
Ghosh said one of the “driving forces” of the microelectronic industry for the past few decades has been to create smaller computer chips that operate faster and cost less. Because of this drive for better chip performance, the NRI funds universities’ research regarding computer chip capabilities using donations from companies in the industry, the federal government and some state governments, NRI Director Jeffrey Welser said.
At this stage of development, computer chips are very small and have a billion transistors packed into a single chip, but they become very hot when they are in use, Ghosh said. They also become “leaky,” he added, which means that even when a chip is not operating, it still emits heat. These concerns are “the biggest impediment” to making computer chips even smaller, he said.
“In about 20 to 30 years, [computer chips] will become about as hot as the sun,” Ghosh said, adding that this is a major concern for the industry. “These problems are fundamental, and we can’t circumvent them with better designs or materials. We have to figure out ways to do computation in a fundamentally different way.”
Ghosh and Stan are currently looking at several methods of reducing the heat produced by a computer chip, including spintronics, which encodes information in the spin of an electron in order to decrease the amount of heat today’s binary coding uses, Ghosh said. Another area of their research involves investigating whether researchers can block the transfer of heat from the computer chip to the device in which it is contained and allow the device to use less power, he said.
By 2020, Welser said, the NRI would like to be producing an alternative to the current chip, which has seen little change in its basic design in the past 30 years.
The research is currently in its first phase, though, and Ghosh said he does not expect to “create a miracle, but to [provide] specific answers [to basic questions] which will have a bearing on the problem.”
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