Nanothermometer Withstands Heat

StyleChief writes "Technology Review reports that researchers from the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) have fashioned nano thermometers from a magnesium oxide nanotube filled with liquid gallium. The tiny thermometers are between 20 and 60 nanometers thick, or about one hundredth the diameter of a red blood cell."

Comments

Re:Could solve a long-standing hardware problem

[kasparov]

If these are magnesium oxide nanotubes filled with liquid gallium, don't you think that SPINNING AT 7200 RPMs would cause a little bit of a fluctuation in the readings? :-)

Applications in microprocessors?

[RobertB-DC]

I'm no engineer, but I wonder if a thermometer "one hundredth the diameter of a red blood cell" might find an application in a future generation of super-fast microprocessor chips?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a spate of Slashdot articles that addressed novel technologies for delaying the end of Moore's (so-called) Law. A diamond substrate was one way to get past thermal issues, but even then we'll still want more more MORE.

What if a super-high-end chip came with a built-in layers of heat-detecting nanothermometers? Instead of heat in one area shutting down the entire chip, the chip could selectively slow down processing in the area with the heat problems. You could actually end up with a self-adjusting chip that automatically overcomes the inevitable variations in the fab process for a faster average speed in the end product.

The disadvantage would be that you might not get 100% reproducible speed results. A benchmark test that hits the floating-point unit hard may slow down due to heat, while integer arithmetic is unaffected.