Surface Plasmon Polariton Waves Could Help High-Performance Processors Keep Their Cool

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have come up with a new approach for helping to keep semiconductor devices, like high-performance processors, cooler: surface plasmon polariton cooling.

"The significance of this research is that a new heat transfer mode using surface waves over a thin metal film deposited on a substrate with low processing difficulty was identified for the first time in the world," claims Bong Jae Lee, the professor of mechanical engineering who led the research project. "It can be applied as a nanoscale heat spreader to efficiently dissipate heat near the hot spots for easily overheatable semiconductor devices."

The team's approach relies on the use of surface plasmon polariton waves, formed on the surface of a metal where it meets a dielectric as a result of strong interactions with free electrons, to more efficiently transfer heat from semiconductor hotspots to other areas. Suitable for existing manufacturing techniques, the team claims, the approach boosts thermal conductivity by around 25 percent using a 100nm-thick titanium film.

Now proven in the lab, the team claims the cooling approach could help to solve a fundamental problem facing ever-shrinking process nodes cramming larger numbers of transistors into even smaller spaces — and, unlike traditional nanoscale heat transfer systems, doesn't suffer from a loss of thermal conductivity as a result of boundary scattering.

The team's work has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters under closed-access terms; an open-access preprint is available on Cornell's arXiv server.