HEATPRONANO · Heat Propagation and Thermal Conductivity in Nanomaterials for Nanoscale Energy Management

The importance of controlling and understanding energy and heat flow, non-equilibrium processes and fluctuations at small length scales is rapidly gaining attention. This emerging field of nanoscale energy management, starts to play a crucial role in many solid-state device applications and its solution is a condition sine qua non for the adoption of future nanoelectronic devices. The need for energy management arises from new challenges brought by the quest of continuous performance improvements of nanoelectronic devices. The enhancement of the integration density of these devices increases the electronic performance but as the commercial field-effect-transistor approach the 10 nm regime, the thermal management becomes a serious issue.The HeatProNano project aims to establish a comprehensive understanding and description of heat transport and local thermal conductivity at the nanoscale. Size-property relations will be studied considering the effects of surfaces and interfaces in order to elucidate the issues affecting power dissipation and allow a better design of future devices. To reach this goal, HeatProNano aims to measure, model, and exploit the transition from thermal equilibrium to local non-equilibrium and its impact for nanoscale energy management. The project will investigate the consequences of local non-equilibrium in structures with dimensions well below the mean free path of thermal phonons. The heat propagation and thermal conductivity on the nanoscale will be studied by a variety of experimental techniques considering long range transport over hundreds of micrometers down to beyond-state-of-the art resolution in the 10 nm-regime. Methods to achieve a controlled tailoring of the thermal conductivity on the nanoscale will be explored. The project therefore encompasses different materials (silicon, germanium, Si/Ge alloys, metal-oxides, and graphene) with strong relevance for existing ICT devices or high potential for future thermal management.