By Zach Winn

The same overheating problem that happens to our laptops also plagues computer servers and data centers around the world — and heat management is only getting harder as computer chips get more compact and powerful.

Understanding how heat moves through chips at the micro scale is essential for continuing to improve their performance. Unfortunately, most methods for measuring heat flow struggle with multilayered devices like the electronics that power our modern world.

Now MIT researchers have demonstrated a new way to study how heat moves through multilayered materials, combining X-rays that penetrate multiple layers with laser pulses for delivering heat. The researchers used the technique to measure how heat moves inside a promising device for transistors and flexible electronics. 

“Chip developers need devices that can handle heat,” says Mingda Li, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and co-corresponding author on an open-access paper about the work in Nature Communications. “I think overheating has become the real bottleneck in device performance. When doing these diagnoses using traditional techniques, they couldn’t get down to the micro- or nanometer scale. But eventually they’d like to go beyond that to study the heat carriers and understand exactly what causes failure, in order to avoid local hotspots and design better devices. This approach is a step in that direction.”

Joining Li on the paper are co-lead authors Thanh Nguyen PhD ’24 and MIT postdoc Chuliang Fu; PhD candidate Mouyang Cheng; Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk ’21, SM ’26; Denisse Córdova Carrizales SM ’26; Eunbi Rha SM ’26; Tyra Espedal ’26; Buxuan Li PhD ’24; Shivam Kajale SM ’23, PhD ’26; Tongtong Liu PhD ’23; Kuan Qiao PhD ’22; University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Zhantao Chen SM ’18, PhD ’22; Argonne National Laboratory researchers Kumar Neeraj, Donald Walko, and Haidan Wen; MIT Principal Research Scientist Svetlana Boriskina; MIT Associate Professor Deblina Sarkar; and co-corresponding author and MIT Associate Professor Jeehwan Kim.