A research team at Stanford University has engineered a new approach to handling the thermal bottleneck of RF transistor by using diamonds. By wrapping transistors in an integrated diamond layer, grown on the transistor, researchers were able to decrease chip temperatures by up to 70°C in the real world, and by 90% in simulated tests.
As published in IEEE Spectrum this week, tests using the new diamond method have proven promising leads in the war against thermal bottlenecks in our electronics. As semiconductors and processors grow ever more powerful and dense, the transistors get ever more tightly packed; for instance, Nvidia's Blackwell GPU architecture holds 208 billion transistors on a single GPU.
