Current Research and Scholarly Interests
The Nanoheat Lab studies heat transfer in electronic nanostructures, microfluidic heat sinks, and packaging, with an emphasis on basic transport physics and industrial impact. We work closely with companies on novel cooling strategies for power devices, portables, ASICs, & data centers.
Current projects (see list below) include microfluidic heat sinks and vapor chambers for power electronics and 3D logic chips, also electron and phonon conduction and energy conversion in nanostructures. We collaborate with EE and MatSci experts, and current sponsors include ARPA-E, the NSF POETS Center, SRC ASCENT, Google, Toyota, Ford, Bosch, and Intel.
Historically, the lab pioneered phonon free path measurements using silicon nanolayers and helped IC companies commercialize SOI transistors, PCRAM, low-k dielectric passivation, and other thermally-hard technologies. Professor Goodson has 35 patents including several that launched Cooligy, a startup that built heat sinks for Apple products and was acquired by Emerson.
More recently, the Nanoheat Lab developed a record-breaking heat sink with Raytheon as part of DARPA ICECOOL, achieving low superheat using diamond channels, porous copper inverse opals, and 3D manifolding. We leveraged this progress to help UIUC launch an NSF Center for power electronics (POETS), which is an ongoing, major research catalyst for the lab.
Over the decades, lab sponsorship has been split between government grants and customized corporate contracts and gifts. We tailor our research for the benefit of both companies and our PhD students. Dozens of Goodson's PhD graduates now work at IC and energy companies, and 20+ are Professors at MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UIUC, Purdue, UCLA, and other schools.
