Seems like this is actually a novel mechanism. Very interesting, I wonder what applications it will find? Cooling of CPUs seems like a bad use case, but I'm sure someone will find a very interesting application
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The most obvious application would be electrically controlled insulators.
If it's winter or summer, insulate the house.
But if outdoors is 72F (or 21C or another ideal temperature), let the ideal temperature into the house.
Temperature controlled crystal oscillators are another application IMO. Applications where we have a 'target temperature', and easy access to differing temperatures (ex inside the oven vs outside the oven vs the heat from a heater)
Why do you think CPU dies can still only be cooled directly over the parts that are generating heat? If I read the article correctly, this tech isn't just the ability to turn off thermal conductivity that already existed, it's the ability to add thermal conductivity that you couldn't before.
I have severe doubts that any "heat semiconductor" would have the same thermal-conductance as copper (or copper heatpipes, and other such heat-devices we have today).
Unfortunately I don't know enough about CPU manufacturing to speculate much more than that.
I don't know much about the inside of CPUs either. But I know that at the PCB-level, we use these devices to carry heat but not electricity.
https://www.vishay.com/en/product/60157/
Copper is still better at conducting heat. But just a little bit of thermal-jumper to make that small electrical separation is all you need.
Datasheet: https://www.vishay.com/docs/60157/thjp.pdf
In any case, modern material science provides us with plenty of useful insulators, conductors, thermal-conductors (but not electrical), semiconductors, and now semi-heat conductors (erm, thermal semiconductor?)
I don't expect the thermal semiconductor to be replacing any of the other materials we already use. Instead, we will find new discoveries and applications for things I can barely imagine.
However, it might be simpler to do this with moving parts or phase-change materials, etc
If you have a radiator at 80C, and a 2nd radiator at 60C and both are connected to HotPlate-X, the heat will naturally find itself going to the 60C, while the 80C will more naturally find its own heat radiating out to the environment quicker.
You don't need a thermal-semiconductor to just have heat flow around. That's just... heat physics.
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There seems to be some practical applications for this new "thermal semiconductor". Though the next questions are that of cost, performance, etc. etc.
If I have 4 cores, and 1 is going flat out, I could see insulating the unused (or lesser used) cores. The idea being give the hot part the full cooling capacity.
That seems like the obvious idea. But maybe I'm misunderstanding or forgetting something fundamental.
Isn't it also to prevent the hot part from heating the other, cooler parts? This could be used to give each part of a CPU its own independent cooling. That'd be pretty cool.
Passive houses use a lot of tricks around the angles light enters a home and skylights etc to collect that energy, but a system that uses little energy and doesn’t have moving parts so it can last the lifetime of the home should allow for more options and thus lower costs.
PS: Solar thermal systems work well and have a fairly short payback period, but involve both moving parts and fluids.
Well, you could build logic gates out of these switching elements ;)
New analogies for Maxwell's Demon. :p
This out of left-field, are there any military applications in when it comes to vehicles' appearance in thermal imagery? I suppose you wouldn't need something like this for the relatively slow switching of stuff like "which side of the tank should be the hot side".
Yeah, you can now display moving images for thermal imagers, like showing the temperature of terrain behind vehicle while moving around.