(June 27, 2016) Standford professor of materials science and engineering, Reinhold Dauskardt, and doctoral candidate Joseph Burg, recently released a study revealing that the layers protecting transistors in chips respond differently to compression and tension of bending and stretching.
“It has always been assumed that these dense insulating materials react exactly the same way to being pushed as they do when pulled, as when they expand due to heat,” said Dauskardt, “We found that they are actually stiffer when compressed than when stretched, and we can use this knowledge to design more durable chips and devices.”
According to Standford News, the materials’ response to expansion and contraction is “inherently related to the interaction within the network of particular atoms or groups of atoms – known as terminal groups – that do not fully bond during production.”
Stanford News explained, “In compression, these terminal groups strongly repel each other to make the network stiffer. In tension, like weak links in a chain, their failure to bond causes these very same atoms to interact less, making the materials less stiff and, consequently, to expand more than expected as they heat up.”
This research paper titled “Elastic and Thermal Expansion Asymmetry in Dense Molecular Materials” was published in the journal Nature Materials.
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