While new, more advanced manufacturing technologies are constantly being developed, the miniaturization trend move at a faster pace. This makes today's mobile devices a lot more portable but also more troublesome as components gets packed closer together and with less room for cooling. To help cool off various chips, manufacturers use small copper or aluminum plates but these have a limited cooling ability, leading to a need of new materials that are more efficient at dissipating heat.

Doing their part, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM in Dresden, backed by Siemens and Plansee have developed a material which "expands no more than ceramics when heated, but has a conductivity one-and-a-half times superior to copper."

"We did this by adding diamond powder to the copper," said says IFAM project manager Dr. Thomas Schubert. "Diamond conducts heat roughly five times better than copper." To be able to unite copper and diamond, the scientists had to mix in a third ingredient, and one option available is chrome. According to the people involved in the project, the first demonstrators of the material have already been produced. Don't expect too see the material used in commercial products too soon but it's still a step forward, one that's worth following in the future.