Researchers help keep up with Moore’s law by exploring a new class of materials

Progress in the field of integrated circuits is measured by adjusting, exceeding or decreasing the rate set by Gordon Moore, former CEO and co-founder of Intel, who said that the number of electronic components, or transistors, per integrated circuit will double. every year. That was over 50 years ago, and surprisingly, his prediction, now called Moore’s Law, came true.

In recent years, it has been thought that the pace has slowed down; one of the biggest challenges in putting more circuits and power on a smaller chip is to manage heat.

A multidisciplinary group that includes Patrick E. Hopkins, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Space Engineering at the University of Virginia, and Will Dichtel, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is working on ‘ devise a new class of material that can potentially keep them cool while they continue to shrink – and to help Moore’s law stay. Their work has recently been in Natural materials.

Electrical insulation materials that minimize electrical cross-talk in chips are called ‘low-k’ dielectrics. This material type is the silent hero that makes all electronics possible by sending the current to eliminate signal erosion and interference; ideally, it can also cause harmful heat by drawing electrical current from the circuit. The heat problem becomes exponential as the chip becomes smaller because not only are there more transistors in a given area, which produces more heat in the same area, they are also closer together, making it more difficult to dissipate heat.

“Scientists were looking for a low-k dielectric material that can handle the heat transfer and space issues that are much smaller,” Hopkins said. “Although we have come a long way, new breakthroughs will simply not happen unless we combine disciplines. For this project, we have used research and principles from different fields – mechanical engineering, chemistry, materials science, electrical engineering – to solve a very difficult problem that none of us can solve ourselves. ‘

Hopkins is one of the leaders in UVA Engineering’s multifunctional materials integration initiative, which brings together researchers from various engineering disciplines to formulate materials with a wide range of functions.

“Seeing ‘my’ problem through someone else’s lens in another field was not only fascinating, it also unleashed ideas that were ultimately advanced. I think we all had the experience,” Ashutosh Giri said. , a former senior scientist from UVA Engineering and Ph.D. D. student in Hopkins’ laboratory, the co-author of the first Natural materials paper and a mechanical, industrial and systems engineering professor at Rhode Island University.

“The core of the project was when the chemical team realized the thermal functionality of their materials, understood a new dimension about their work, and when the mechanical and materials team possibly understood the level of molecular engineering with chemistry,” Giri said .

“We take polymer sheets that are only one atom thick – we call it 2-D – and control their properties by laying the sheets in a specific architecture,” Dichtel said.

“Our efforts to improve the methods for producing high-quality 2-D polymer films have made this collaboration possible.”

The team is applying this new material class to try to meet the requirements of the miniature of transistors on a dense chip, Dichtel said.

“It has enormous potential for use in the semiconductor industry, the chip manufacturing industry. The material has a low electrical conductivity, or ‘low-k’, and a high capacity to provide heat transfer,” he said.

This combination of properties was recently identified by the International Semiconductor Roadmap as a prerequisite for next-generation integrated circuits.

“For this project, we are concentrating on the thermal properties of this new material class, which is fantastic but even more exciting that we are just scratching at the surface,” said Austin Evans, a Ph.D. student in Dichtel’s laboratory in the North West and first co-author of the Natural materials paper. “The development of new classes of materials with unique combinations of properties has amazing technological potential.

“We are already researching this new class of materials for many applications, for example chemical observation. We can use these materials to ” sense ” determine which chemicals and how many of the chemicals are in the air. This has major implications. “For example, by having knowledge of the chemicals in the air, we can optimize food storage, transportation, and distribution to reduce global food waste. If we continue to investigate, we will likely find even more properties unique to these new materials,” Evans said.