Heat Spreaders developed to protect devices from overheating
As Electronic devices become more powerful and smaller, they generate more heat, which can reduce their safety and lead to breakage. In recent years, engineers have therefore tried to develop strategies that could prevent the electronics from overheating. One proposed solution involves the use of heat spreaders, layers that promote the spread and dissipation of heat inside devices.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) recently developed an alternative strategy that could cool electronics more efficiently than other existing solutions. Their strategy, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on the use of heat spreaders composed of an electrically insulating layer of poly(2-chloro-p-xylylene) (parylene C) and a copper coating.
Heat spreaders are cooling systems made of materials with high thermal conductivity such as copper and aluminum. These systems can spread the heat generated by the devices over a larger surface area, making it easier for them to shed heat to the surrounding area.
The advantage of using protective coated heat spreaders is that they completely cover the electronic device, including the top, bottom and sides of the device, Gebrael explained. This is not possible with standard heat spreaders, which are usually placed on top of the device, or with standard PCB copper plates. By achieving these conformal coatings, we were able to offer more paths for heat to exit the electronic device, which translates into better cooling performance. In the past, teams had developed similar techniques that prevent overheating by opening more paths for heat to escape electronic devices.
However, previously proposed solutions use very expensive materials such as diamonds. This complicates their development and implementation on a large scale. Gebrael and his colleagues evaluated their copper-clad heatspreaders in a series of tests and found them to perform very well. Specifically, their solution achieved up to a 740% increase in power per unit volume compared to standard air-cooled copper heatsinks used today . This feature makes it possible to fit more electronics in a smaller space without overheating problems, which is essential for creating platforms for future technologies (AI, augmented reality, etc.). In the future, the heat spreaders developed by this research team could be used to cool electronic devices more efficiently without the need for expensive materials. In particular, the coating recipe they propose combines processes already used in the electronics industry. This could further facilitate their application in real environments and their commercialization.
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