Houston Daily

Engineers at the University of Houston have developed a new thin-film material that could improve the speed and energy efficiency of artificial intelligence devices. The research, published in ACS Nano, introduces a two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric designed to replace traditional components in integrated circuit chips that generate heat.

Alamgir Karim, Dow Chair and Welch Foundation Professor at the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, explained the motivation behind the work: “AI has made our energy needs explode.” He added, “Many AI data centers employ vast cooling systems that consume large amounts of electricity to keep the thousands of servers with integrated circuit chips running optimally at low temperatures to maintain high data processing speed, have shorter response time and extend chip lifetime.”

To address these challenges, Karim and his former doctoral student Maninderjeet Singh used organic framework materials recognized by a Nobel Prize to develop new dielectric films. Singh, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, said, “These next-generation materials are expected to boost the performance of AI and conventional electronics devices significantly.” Singh collaborated on this research during his doctoral studies at UH with Devin Shaffer, a professor of civil engineering at UH, and doctoral student Erin Schroeder.

The team focused on “low-k” electronic materials made from light elements such as carbon. According to Karim, “Low-k materials are base insulators that support integrated circuit conductors carrying high speed and high frequency electrical signals with low power consumption (i.e. high-efficiency because chips can run cooler and faster!) and also low interference (signal cross talk).”

Karim’s team created sheetlike films using carbon and other light elements bonded covalently into porous crystalline structures. They studied these films’ electronic properties for use in future devices with Saurabh Tiwary, another doctoral student. Karim and Singh reported: “Incorporation of low-k materials into integrated circuit devices has the tremendous potential to greatly lower power consumption by the booming AI data centers growth. We discovered that the 2D sheets had an ultralow dielectric constant and ultrahigh electrical breakdown strength needed for high-voltage operation for high power devices, with good thermal stability even at elevated device operating temperatures.”

The films were produced using synthetic interfacial polymerization—a method where molecules dissolved in two non-mixing liquids form strong crystalline layered sheets—originally discovered by Omar M. Yaghi of UC Berkeley and other Nobel laureates.

Funding for this research came from the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Foundation New Direction program.