Outrunning Diamond – A New Standard in Heat Spreaders
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Benchmarking Performance
“Diamonds may be forever, but in cooling, forever isn’t fast enough.”
– Molten Dynamics
For decades, diamond has been considered the pinnacle of thermal performance. With conductivity around 2,200 W/m·K, it’s long been the go-to choice for high-end heat spreaders in aerospace, RF, and elite compute packages. But in AI and HPC environments, the needs are shifting.
It’s not just about spreading heat anymore; it’s about removing it, fast.
Enter liquid metal. Unlike static materials like diamond, liquid metal is dynamic, scalable, and actively pumpable, giving it the power to outperform even diamond in real-world chip cooling scenarios.
Diamond’s Legacy and Its Limits
Diamond works. It conducts heat five times better than copper, and its passive properties have earned it a place in high-end TIMs and specialized modules. But it has its drawbacks.
It’s brittle, difficult to manufacture at scale, and costly. More importantly, it’s a passive material; it can spread heat, but it can’t move it. As chip power climbs past 1,000W, that’s a serious limitation.
Liquid Metal Changes the Equation
Unlike diamond, liquid metal doesn’t just sit under the chip, it flows through it. Our gallium-based alloy is highly conductive, with thermal performance orders of magnitude beyond water and other coolants. But more importantly, it’s part of a loop, meaning it pulls heat away from the chip and carries it out of the system entirely.
It conforms to any surface geometry, eliminates interface gaps, and enables active thermal regulation, something diamond simply can’t do.
In the Lab: Diamond vs. Liquid Metal
We put both approaches to the test using comparable setups. Diamond-backed passive plates performed well, holding up under moderate loads around 800–1000W. But once we pushed beyond those levels, performance flattened, die temps rose, and thermal saturation set in.
Liquid metal, on the other hand, handled up to 5,000W in the same thermal footprint, all while maintaining safe junction temperatures and consistent thermal behavior across the die.
This isn’t just a materials win. It’s a system-level victory made possible by combining high-conductivity fluid with a sealed, precision-engineered pump and exchanger.
Why This Matters for High-Power Compute
As silicon moves toward chiplets, stacked dies, and denser core configurations, heat is no longer localized, it’s layered and unpredictable. Diamond was built for small-area hotspots. Liquid metal is built for dynamic, high-flux, multi-chip environments.
It provides:
- Smooth, conformal thermal contact
- Consistent performance across temperature swings
- System-wide heat removal, not just spread
Final Thought: The Future Isn’t Solid
Diamond earned its place in thermal history. But the future of compute needs something better, something that moves.
Liquid metal doesn’t spread heat. It removes it.
And in the race to cool tomorrow’s chips, that’s what wins.