The most common way to cool a processor at the moment is with a heatsink and fan combination on top of a thermal compound linking them to the surface of the chip. But there’s only so much heat that can be dissipated with such solutions and the thermal compound being used will degrade over time.

Researchers at Stanford University, working with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), have come up with a new cooling material known as thermal nanotape. It can expand and contract like foam, has the thermal conductivity of copper, is cheap to produce, and doesn’t degrade like current thermal materials do. At the same time it is flexible allowing it to be applied in more situations while dealing with heat better than existing solutions.

The reason the nanotape performs so well is due to a combination of binder materials surrounding carbon nanotubes. This allows for very high thermal conduction while remaining flexible to adjust as required on the conditions.

Jon Candelarioa, director of packaging at SRC, commented:

Researchers love to create useful materials and structures that we’ve never seen before, and this new thermal nanotape revolutionises the chip’s heat sink contact. Instead of being forced to rely upon the properties of just a single material, this combination gives the integrated circuits industry an opportunity to circumvent severe performance limitations and continue to improve packaging without adding cost.

Such a material will make cooling easier as components continue to get smaller. In particular it is better suited to dealing with hotspots on a chip where heat generation is higher than normal. These will become more of an issue as processors get more complex and go below 20nm.

While thermal nanotape has already been proven to work by the researchers, we shouldn’t expect to see it used to cool a commercial CPU or GPU until at least 2014.

Read more at the SRC press release, via Thinq