"Test Processor With New Thermal Transistors Cools Chip Without Moving Parts" https://www.tomshardware.com/news/test-processor-with-new-th... :
> Compared to normal cooling methods, the experimental transistors were 13 times better.
"Electrically gated molecular thermal switch" (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4297 :
> Abstract: Controlling heat flow is a key challenge for applications ranging from thermal management in electronics to energy systems, industrial processing, and thermal therapy. However, progress has generally been limited by slow response times and low tunability in thermal conductance. In this work, we demonstrate an electronically gated solid-state thermal switch using self-assembled molecular junctions to achieve excellent performance at room temperature. In this three-terminal device, heat flow is continuously and reversibly modulated by an electric field through carefully controlled chemical bonding and charge distributions within the molecular interface. The devices have ultrahigh switching speeds above 1 megahertz, have on/off ratios in thermal conductance greater than 1300%, and can be switched more than 1 million times. We anticipate that these advances will generate opportunities in molecular engineering for thermal management systems and thermal circuit design.
>Can switch at 1MHz
>can be switched "more than 1 million times"
Seems like longevity is a potential issue. Definitely could be useful for a few applications (especially temperature control), though I'm not really sure about a pure cooling application.
Would there be any returns to pairing this approach with recent advances in laser cooling (and integrated photonics)?
It's an odd combination of numbers. So if you use it for one second, it breaks?
Though I guess, 1 trillion switches is more than 1 million times too...
If you operate it constantly at it's max switching frequency, yes.
Existing transistors and physical switches etc. will also have silly short lifetimes if you do that math. In practice why would you be switching so much?
> Existing transistors and physical switches etc. will also have silly short lifetimes if you do that math
Power switching in PWM is often 10s of KHz switching speeds and these are expected to last years so not really true.
I mean silly compared to what they will actually be in practice, not that they would also be on the order of a second.
You don't go ok switch is good for 10M actuations, actuation force is x, so it takes this long to press, times by 10M.. switch will last 17.5 months (or whatever it might come to).
You run into those 10 million actuations really quickly on anything Logitech branded.
Not really. Transistors, especially in power electronics, will almost always be run at basically their max switching frequency continuously for almost the entirety of their power-on time. They certainly will not wear out after 1 second of use at their maximum frequency.
(This kind of thing is extremely common in MEMS, BTW: a lot of cool things you can fabricate mechanically in silicon will do something really cool but for a similarly short time period, and so they never leave the lab. All the actual uses of MEMS have much bigger constraints on what you can actually make)
Being able to switch at 1mhz and having to switch 1 million times in a second are different things. You can want a very fast switch but not to do it often.
That's the only way I can rescue these sentences which I agree are a bit confusing.