Audio Materials Science

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Innovative Materials and Cooling Technologies for Next-Generation Electronic Chips and Data Center Cooling

In Elison Matioli's TEDx talk "Can Materials Mimic the Human Body," he explores nature-inspired solutions to address the limitations of shrinking electronic transistors and the heat management challenges in data centers.

Apparently unpredictable yet controllable, phase change materials like vanadium oxide offer a promising alternative to traditional transistors. These materials exhibit a kind of memory of the previous excitation, stored within the structure of the material for hours, and adjust its time response to an applied voltage accordingly.

To address heat generation in electronics, Matioli's team developed micro-tubes embedded within chips to bring the heat sink closer to hot spots. An optimized network of microfluidic tubes, reminiscent of the human body's vascular system, can create a more efficient cooling system. This could potentially make the chips more powerful and reduce data centers’ environmental impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEdLwzRpWlY&feature=youtu.be

Can materials mimic the human body? | Elison Matioli | TEDxArendal Prof. Dr. Elison Matioli’s research focuses on the development of new semiconductor device concepts for more efficient use of energy and less heat generation...

Researchers Produced Film Material That Changes Color When Stretched
MIT's Laboratory for Bio-Inspired Photonic Engineering has pioneered a groundbreaking technique for creating large-scale, structurally colored materials that change hues when stretched. By exposing holographic recording material to light from a projector and bonding it to a reflective surface, the researchers developed stretchable, color-shifting materials that can be applied to textiles for visually dynamic fabrics or thin sheets of black silicone for light-sensitive applications. This scalable manufacturing approach, leveraging modern holography, has opened up avenues for innovation in technology and medicine. The team's technique rapidly produces detailed images, and the resulting material's nanoscale structures reconfigure when stretched, causing a change in color due to its sensitivity to strain. This work represents a simple yet highly effective method to develop large-area photonic structures.
https://youtu.be/3-BH7164GaM

Stretchy, color-shifting materials Inspired by "structural color" found in nature, a team of engineers have developed a technique for producing materials that when stretched can transform thei...

Semiconductor Surface States Bend Light Wavelength
Electrical engineers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed a more efficient way of converting light from one wavelength to another, opening the door for improvements in the performance of imaging, sensing and communication systems. The UCLA-led team has devised a solution to enhance wavelength-conversion efficiency by exploring a generally undesirable but natural phenomenon called semiconductor surface states. "Incoming light can hit the electrons in the semiconductor lattice and move them to a higher energy state, at which point they are free to jump around within the lattice. The electric field created across the surface of the semiconductor further accelerates these photo-excited, high-energy electrons, which then unload the extra energy they gained by radiating it at different optical wavelengths, thus converting the wavelengths,” explains Deniz Turan, the study's lead author. "Through this new framework, wavelength conversion happens easily and without any extra added source of energy as the incoming light crosses the field," he adds.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24957-1

Metallic glass is an emerging class of high-performance materials whose unique properties are derived from its amorphous microstructure (absence of long-range order). The exceptionally high strength and elastic limit of these metallic glasses compared to their crystalline polymorphs allows them to store a substantially high elastic energy. But these resilient materials can also be easily shaped like plastics into complex configurations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd370rlvT5M&t=39s

Bulk metallic glasses: A tough new material for manufacturing Yale Professor Jan Schroers and his graduate students have developed some unique uses for metallic glasses, a particularly tough metallic alloy that can be m...