Polymer‐metal nano‐composite films for thermal management

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present a novel nanostructured polymer-metal composite film providing continuous all-metal thermally conductive pathways, intended to meet future performance requirements on thermal interface materials (TIMs) in microelectronics packaging applications. Design/methodology/approach -Porous polymer structures with a thickness of approximately 100 mm were manufactured using electrospinning technology. Pressure-assisted infiltration of low-melting temperature alloy into the porous polymeric carrier resulted in the final composite film. Thermal performance was evaluated using an accurate and improved implementation of the ASTM D5470 standard in combination with an Instron 5548 MicroTester. Finally, a brief comparative study using three current state-of-the-art commercial TIMs were carried out for reference purposes. Findings -Composite films with continuous all-metal thermally conductive pathways from surface to surface were successfully fabricated. Thermal resistances down to 8.5 K mm 2 W 2 1 at 70 mm bond-line thickness were observed, corresponding to an effective thermal conductivity of 8 W m 2 1 K 2 1 , at moderate assembly pressures (200-800 kPa), more than twice the effective thermal conductivity of the commercial reference materials evaluated. Originality/value -A unique high-performance nanostructured polymer-metal composite film for TIM applications with the potential to meet the microelectronics industry's future demands on thermal performance and cost efficiency is presented.

A novel catalyst based on electrospun silver-doped silica fibers with ribbon morphology

“…Electrospinning enables production of very specific fibers with manifold nanostructures, such as core-shell morphology [18][19][20][21]5] or hollow fibers [22,23]. The unique morphological characteristics of electrospun nanofibers, e.g., open structure providing low resistance to mass transport, and large volumetric surface area, are expected to lead to diverse applications, such as templates [24][25][26][27], catalysts [15,17,28,29], optoelectronics [30,31], sensor technology [12,13,32,33], drug delivery [34][35][36][37], or medicine and tissue engineering [38,39], just to name the most important.…”

Nanowire-Polymer Nanocomposites as Thermal Interface Material

“…This was further coated with Field's metal alloy (InBiSn) which has a melting point of ~60 °C by force infiltration to create the composite film. A thermal impedance of 8.5×10 -2 °Ccm 2 W -1 was reported at a pressure of 0.8 MPa with a bond line thickness of 70 μm (Carlberg et al 2009). …”

“…(Kempers et al 2009a;Kempers et al 2009b). Carlberg et al introduced and characterised the thermal performance of a nanostructured polymer-metal composite which consists of high-porosity nanofiber network infiltrated with a low melting temperature alloy (Carlberg et al 2008a;Carlberg et al 2008b;Carlberg et al 2009). Wunderle et al developed and applied different surface modification methods to create the so-called "nano-sponge" in a thin Au layer (Wunderle 2010).…”

A new thermally conductive thermoplastic die attach film

“…The two pieces of printed circuit board have a contact area of 64 mm 2 • Thermal conductivity: Thermal conductivity of DAFs was tested according to the standard of ASTM D5470 (Standard Test Method for Thermal Transmission Properties of Thermally Conductive Electrical Insulation Materials). [5] The thermal performance of fabricated composite films was evaluated using an experimental setup, shown in Figure 4.…”