Cubic Boron Arsenide - Best conductor ever

[Forest Green]

Cubic Boron Arsenide Promises 10x Better Heat Dissipation for Chips

The best semiconductor in existence - in a few decades' time.

www.tomshardware.com

This could mean 10x faster clock speeds.

 

[Hobbes]

No. Clock frequencies have remained constant over the past 10 years or so because it becomes really hard to design chips at higher frequencies: every conductor in the IC starts to work as an antenna, and elements start to interfere with each other. That isn't solved by this material. It will make it easier to push more power through an IC without overheating it.

 

[Forest Green]

No. Clock frequencies have remained constant over the past 10 years or so because it becomes really hard to design chips at higher frequencies: every conductor in the IC starts to work as an antenna, and elements start to interfere with each other. That isn't solved by this material. It will make it easier to push more power through an IC without overheating it.

So what does that mean then? Smaller transistors? More cores?

 

[Hobbes]

The size of the transistors depends mostly on the lithography process. I suspect it means less thermal throttling. And you can stack more layers on top of each other (making chips thicker instead of taking up a larger area), which can improve performance by having things closer together.

 

[JWilly]

It'll also mean smaller (i.e. lower cost) chips, and higher current and power ratings, for power electronics chips...linear voltage regulators, power switches, analog amplifiers, just about anything that handles more than logic levels of current. So it's highly important. It just isn't primarily about making logic chips faster, except indirectly.

 

[Forest Green]

Don't they use decoupling to stop ICs acting as antennae?

 

[Hobbes]

Yes, but decoupling has its own issues: you're adding capacitors, which add their own delay.

 

[OliverSedlacek]

Processor clock rates are limited by the speed at which digital signals can propagate along a wire, at 10GHz after you've allowed for semiconductor switching and synchronisation delays you can only travel a few mm.
Where thermal conductivity really matters is in power electronics, so maybe smaller traction motor inverters.