Special Report: The Hot, Hot Future of Chips

Diamonds, lasers, and oil aren't the first things you may think of when considering ways to keep chips and computers cool. But as modern chip designs pack and stack more transistors into ever smaller spaces, heat has emerged as a critical problem.

To solve it, the semiconductor industry is throwing everything at the wall. What sticks could enable the scaling of not only AI data centers but also a host of applications in consumer electronics, communications, and military equipment.

As we start doing more 3D chips, the heat problem gets much worse," said Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, who has been covering semiconductors on and off for a quarter century.

For the special report in this issue, Moore teamed up with Associate Editor Dina Genkina, who oversees our computing coverage. They talked to engineers at IEEE conferences like IEDM and Supercomputing about how technologists are getting the heat out in new and surprising ways.

See the full report: https://spectrum.ieee.org/special-reports/keeping-chips-cool/