Heat is the biggest enemy of computers, and the latest batch of cutting-edge CPUs that go offline are usually the hottest in history. Silicon Valley is well aware that this trend cannot last for too long.
Fortunately, some of the world's top chip manufacturers are already trying various materials to significantly reduce operating temperatures.
The Diamond Foundry, which cultivates synthetic diamonds in the San Francisco production laboratory, is one of the best among them. The company has produced hundreds of four inch wide synthetic diamond chips with a thickness of less than three millimeters. Their idea is to replace some of the inactive silicon in traditional microchips with a layer of artificial diamond with excellent thermal conductivity.
Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Diamond Foundry, told The Wall Street Journal that chips using its synthetic diamond chips can run at least twice the rated clock speed without malfunction. According to reports, in the laboratory, company engineers even successfully made NVIDIA's most powerful chip run at three times the speed of its basic clock.
Roscheisen said that Diamond Foundry is in talks with leading chip manufacturers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and defense contractors to help improve chips and electronic products. Rothschild added that the key to further exploring this pathway lies in the reduction of synthetic diamond manufacturing costs.
Diamond Foundry is not the only alternative chip substrate manufacturer. A company called Coherent produces polycrystalline diamond chips, while another company called Element Six provides large chips that can be used between chips and heat sinks.
In September this year, Intel launched a glass substrate for next-generation packaging, which it has been researching for over a decade. Compared with modern organic substrates, glass has better thermal, physical, and optical properties, which can increase interconnect density by 10 times. Glass can also reduce pattern distortion by 50%, enhance flatness, and thus improve the focusing depth of lithography.
Intel stated at the time that it hoped to provide the first complete glass substrate solutions starting in the second half of this century.