Projects

CURRENT

Thermal transport and temperature distributions have a profound impact on the health, growth, modification, and diagnostics of cells and biological molecules including DNA. The vast majority of...
A variety of modern high-power electronic devices are based on high electron mobility transistors (HEMT) and generate enormous heat fluxes that can exceed 1 kW/cm2. The overall power conversion...
Modern lithography equipment using extreme ultraviolet radiation demands precision optical components that can tolerate enormous radiation densities while resisting thermal damage. Many of these...
The performance density of modern electronic systems (including desktop and mainframe computers and routers) is severely limited by the temperature rise at hotspots. Hotspots are regions of...
Micro- and nanotechnology have revolutionized the design opportunities, and the relevant fundamental transport phenomena, associated with heat exchangers. Much progress has been motivated by heat...
The most innovative energy conversion technologies, ranging from solar and thermoelectrics to lasers (which convert electric energy to light), are benefitting from nanostructures and/or...
Hotspot mitigation, thermal management paths, and thermomechanical degradation are key challenges for 3D integration, in particular due to the increased quantity and complexity of "thermally...
Phase change memory (PCM or PCRAM) is based on rapid, thermally-induced phase transitions in Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) and related compounds. Because the phase change is induced by temperature changes, thermal...
Interface thermal transport is arguably the leading fundamental challenge for the design and implementation of advanced nanostructure technologies for energy conversion, computation, and data storage...
Heat transfer instruction has experienced importance changes over the past two decades with the increasing relevance of new disciplines of science, such as solid state physics, and the importance of...
A key to improving vehicle efficiency is recovering a fraction of the energy lost with the hot exhaust gases, and a promising strategy is to integrate thermoelectric generators with the exhaust...

ARCHIVE

Carbon nanotubes offer unusual thermal, mechanical, and electrical properties, which vary with chirality, geometry (multiwall vs single-wall), and length. They are promising for a variety of...
Synthetic diamond films are promising for a broad variety of engineering applications incuding wear-resistance coatings, semiconductor passivation, and high-temperature electronics. Diamond enjoys...
Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells show promise as CO2-free energy-conversion devices. Reducing the size of the gas delivery channels could improve the efficiency and power density of PEM fuel...
High spatial resolution thermometry is important for a variety of applications including electronic circuits, biological and chemical microsystems and advanced photonic devices including lasers and...
Nanofluids contain a small volume fraction of nanoparicles, nanowires, or nanotubes for targeted changes in thermal, rheological and/or other properties. Prior to Stanford's efforts in this...
Thermal interface materials (TIMs) play a central role in the performance and reliability of electronic systems. They are the route for thermal conduction between semiconductor chips and metal heat...
The basic physics of phonon conduction in dielectrics and semiconductors has been the focus of research for more than a century. However, recent improvements in nanofabrication technologies have...
Heat conduction in polymer thin films and related deformation phenomena play a central role in modern manufacturing technologies, semiconductor processing, and data storage. Applications range from...
As the silicon transistor is scaled to deep submicrometer gate lengths, the microprocessor thermal management challenge has been extended to nanoscale thermal conduction and coupled electron-phonon...
High density data storage is one of the key challenges for next-generation computation. Data storage techniques that involve material displacement of motion are not subjected to the same fundamental...
With the scaling of silicon nanotransistors into the deep submicrometer regime, a variety of compounding factors are increasing the temperature rise in the multilevel interconnect systems in modern...