Fujitsu Could Help Smartphone Chips Run Cooler

angry tapir writes: If parts of your phone are sometimes too hot to handle, Fujitsu may have the answer: a thin heat pipe that can spread heat around mobile devices, reducing extremes of temperature. Fujitsu Laboratories created a heat pipe in the form of a loop that's less than 1mm thick. The device can transfer about 20W, about five times more heat than current thin heat pipes or thermal materials, the company said.

Comments

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the parent got one word wrong. Typically resistance decreases as temperature increases in semiconductors, not the other way around. Metallic conductors behave in the opposite way.

Re:Waste of time

[BronsCon]

Preface: I'm not qualified to discuss this in more detail than layman's terms will allow. I'm sure someone more qualified will step in and clear things up (and correct any inaccuracies in my information), and welcome them to do so.

You're thinking of resistance as a current-limiting mechanism, and you're absolutely correct in that respect. What happens, though, as the resistance of the signal path through a CPU increases, the switching current of the gates of the individual transistors in that data path also increases. This increase in switching current is greater than the current-limiting effect of the added resistance, increasing the over-all current draw of the chip.

That explanation is surely chock full of WTF-level inaccuracies, so don't quote me on that; standing by for correction.