With top speed and performance, the transistor could open new frontiers in heat management of computer chips through an atomic-level design and molecular engineering. The advance could also further the understanding of how heat is regulated in the human body.A team of researchers from UCLA has unveiled a first-of-its-kind stable and fully solid-state thermal transistor that uses an electric field to control a semiconductor device's heat movement.
While there have been efforts in tuning thermal conductivity, their performances have suffered due to reliance on moving parts, ionic motions, or liquid solution components. This has resulted in slow switching speeds for heat movement on the order of minutes or far slower, creating issues in performance reliability as well as incompatibility with semiconductor manufacturing.
In the team's proof-of-concept design, a self-assembled molecular interface is fabricated and acts as a conduit for heat movement. Switching an electrical field on and off through a third-terminal gate controls the thermal resistance across the atomic interfaces and thereby allowing heat to move through the material with precision.
Other authors on the paper -- all from UCLA -- include Man Li, Huan Wu, Erin Avery, Zihao Qin, Dominic Goronzy, Huu Duy Nguyen and Tianhan Liu. Hu and Weiss are also affiliated with the California NanoSystems Institute, as well as UCLA Samueli's departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering.
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