The team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley used the silicon-28 as the material for the nanowires. They found that the silicon-28 nanowires were able to conduct heat up to 150 percent more efficiently.
Heat conductivity is an increasingly important feature of processors and computer hardware because as components become powerful they generate more heat. Without good thermals this heat can compromise the performance of the processors and can even cause computer parts to break down.
Although silicon is not a very good heat conductor, when it is broken down into silicon-28 (Si-28) it’s heat conducting abilities scale up by around 10 percent. However, the Berkeley team found that when they scaled down to using 90nm nanowires heat conductance with Si-28 improved by 150 percent.
“We expected to see only an incremental benefit — something like 20 percent — of using isotopically pure material for nanowire heat conduction,” said Junqiao Wu, one of the authors of the research.
The Berkeley team hope that their discovery could allow chipmakers to create smaller and denser chips with higher levels of performance without having to worry as much about the temperatures of their hardware.