Thermal Transistor Developed

How can we design electronic devices that don’t overheat?

Theoretically, these transistors can even incorporate a version of Maxwell's Demon to recycle whatever heat they collect as electricity to improve the efficiency, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that just yet. Thermistors are common resistors used as a cheap circuit breaker to prevent things from frying. If your electronics get way too hot, the thermistor will fry to prevent everything else from frying, and then be cheap to replace. These are two dimensional transistors designed to convert heat into electricity, so they can be cheaply added on top of existing transistors doing work.

The article doesn't say how good they are or anything like that, just that these are first with possible commercial applications. Already, the chips are becoming so large with so many tiny transistors on them, that cooling them is becoming as elaborate and important to lowering prices as is putting all the crap on them. A twenty degree drop in temperature would be phenomenal, but this is likely to have more modest results at first. Sony did something similar with adding carbon nanotubes to their lithium ion batteries, and they tended to explode, but active transistors mean they should be able to tweak the system to the individual chip.

Thermodynamics are still struggling to crawl out of the dark ages, simply because they have turned out to be far more complex than anyone imagined, just like quantum mechanics.