Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling

> Rather than allowing heat to build up, what if we could spread it out right from the start, inside the chip?... To do that, we’d have to introduce a highly thermally conductive material inside the IC, mere nanometers from the transistors, without messing up any of their very precise and sensitive properties. Enter an unexpected material—diamond.

> ... my research group at Stanford University has managed what seemed impossible. We can now grow a form of diamond suitable for spreading heat, directly atop semiconductor devices at low enough temperatures that even the most delicate interconnects inside advanced chips will survive... Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating no more than a couple of micrometers thick.

> The potential benefits could be huge. In some of our earliest gallium-nitride radio-frequency transistors, the addition of diamond dropped the device temperature by more than 50 °C.

It sounds like the most important part of the article (and another cool quote) is this:

>Until recently we knew how to grow it only at circuit-slagging temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C.

So basically, the big breakthrough was low-temp growth of a diamond lattice. Very cool they can do it at such a low temperature. It must be a crazy low temp - probably under 100C?

"we were able to find a formula that produced coatings of large-grained polycrystalline diamond all around devices at 400 °C, which is a survivable temperature for CMOS circuits and other devices."