IEEE Spectrum features research at UCR Electrical Engineering
IEEE Spectrum magazine, the
main publication of the largest international engineering society, highlighted
research conducted at UCR’s Department of Electrical Engineering in
its full-length feature story and the journal’s front matter. IEEE
Spectrum invited Professor Alexander Balandin to write a full-length
review about a recent discovery of graphene’s unique thermal conductivity
and the prospects of graphene materials and phonon engineering for cooling
of the next generation of computer chips. The feature article entitled
“Chill Out: New Materials and Designs Keep the Chips Cool” appeared
in Spectrum’s October issue and on its on-line version. The heat removal
from electronic chips became a major hurdle in continuing downscaling
of electronic devices and performance improve
ment of computers. A shift
to multi-core architectures in computer chips represents just one example
of the seriousness of thermal management issues. Increasing power densities
in the localized hot spots inside the chips call for new approaches
of heat removal implemented at the materials and devices level, which
is a conceptual change from the post-chip-design thermal management
at the system level. Some of the new approaches to thermal management
are described in the invited review, which is available from either IEEE Spectrum or Professor Balandin’s Nano-Device Laboratory
(NDL) web-sites. Figures
below show IEEE Spectrum artistic rendering of the graphene heat spreaders
and illustration of the first measurement of graphene’s thermal conductivity
carried out at Balandin Laboratory.
