Aug. 31—A University of Colorado Boulder professor was awarded a $1 million Department of Defense contract to solve a big problem with tiny electronics — overheating microchips.
Assistant Professor Sanghamitra Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to find a way to prevent microchips from overheating, which causes them to fail.
"The chips are the lifeblood of the modern economy and the brains of every electronic device and system, including iPhones, toasters, data centers and credit cards," Neogi said.
"A new car might have more than a thousand chips, each one managing a different facet of the vehicle's operation. Semiconductors are also the driving force behind the innovations poised to revolutionize life over the next century, like quantum computing and artificial intelligence."
OpenAI's ChatGPT, for example, was reportedly trained on 10,000 of the most advanced chips available, Neogi said.
Microchips are made of billions of transistors, which are tiny units in a microchip that control operations. Neogi's research will focus on thermal management of the transistors, which also controls how the chip heats.
"A modern-day transistor has semiconductor, metal and dielectric confined within an incredibly small, nanoscopic space," Neogi said.
"For example, the main chip of an iPhone has anywhere from 10 to 20 billion transistors. So if you increase the temperature, a chemical reaction can take place and can generate different kinds of defects in it. These defects can damage the material, the transistor and consequently the main making the device fail."
When a microchip overheats, it can bend, warp and break due to these chemical reactions. An overheating microchip can also slow down processing speed. For example, a microchip in a cell phone will overheat after being used for a long period of time, causing the phone itself to get hot and function more slowly.
A computer has fans and cooling channels to prevent overheating. However, as microchips get smaller and more powerful, those avenues of cooling no longer work as a solution.
Rinaldo Miorini, senior engineer at General Electric Research, said the problem of overheating microchips is not an easy one to solve. Miorini met Neogi through workshops and conferences and is also involved in microchip research.
He said Neogi is tackling a scale of matter that's so small it's not visible even with a microscope. The typical laws used for large scale matter don't work where Neogi is exploring, Miorini said, making it like a "frontier of science."