Vertically Aligned Graphene-based Thermal Interface Material with High Thermal Conductivity

High density packaging in combination with increased transistor integration inevitably leads to challenging power densities in terms of thermal management. Here, a novel highly thermal conductive and lightweight graphene based thermal interface materials (GT) was developed for thermal management in power devices. Composed by vertically graphene structures, GTs provide a continuous high thermal conductivity phase along the path of thermal transport, which lead to outstanding thermal properties. The highest through-plane thermal conductivity GTs reaches to 1000 W/mK, which is orders of magnitude higher than conventional TIMs, and even outperforms the pure indium by over ten times. In addition, a thin layer of indium metal that coated on the surface of GTs can easily form alloys with many other metals at a relatively low reflow temperature. Therefore, GTs, as an excellent TIM, can provide complete physical contact between two surfaces with minimized the contact resistance. The measured total thermal resistance and effective thermal conductivity by using 300 m thick GTs as TIM between two copper blocks reaches to ~ 3.7 Kmm2 /W and ~ 90 W/mK, respectively. Such values are significantly higher than the randomly dispersed composites presented above, and show even better thermal performance than pure indium bonding. In addition, GTs has more advantages than pure indium bonding, including low weight (density < 2 g/cm3), low complexity during assembly and maintainability. The resulting GTs thus opens new opportunities for addressing large heat dissipation issues in form-factor driven electronics and other high power driven systems.