The effects of carbon nanotubes on CPU cooling

Computers today have evolved from being big bulky machines that took up rooms of space into small simple machines for net browsing and into small but complicated multi-core servers and supercomputing architectures. This has been possible due to the evolution of the processors. Today processors have reached 45nm specifications with millions of transistors. Transistors produce heat when they run. Today more than ever we have a growing need for managing this heat efficiently. It is indicated that increasing power density can cause a difficulty in managing temperatures on a chip. It is also mentioned that we need to move to a more temperature aware architecture.;In this research we try and address the issue of handling the heat produced by processors in an efficient manner. We have tried to see if the use of carbon nanotubes will prove useful in dissipating the heat produced by the processor in a more efficient way. In the process we have also tried to come up with a repeatable experimental setup as there is not work that we have been able to find describing this exact procedure. The use of carbon nanotubes seemed natural as they have a very high thermal conductivity value. Also one of the uncertain aspects of the experiment is the use of carbon nanotubes as they are still under study and their properties have not been completely understood and there has been some inconsistency in the theoretical values of their properties and the experimental results obtained so far. The results that we got were not exactly what we expected but were close, and were in the right direction indicating that more work in future would show better and consistent results.