SMTA International 2024

PDC5: Fundamentals of Thermal Interface Materials
Instructor: Rita Mohanty, Ph.D., Henkel Corporation

The cooling of electronics is critical to the safety, performance, and reliability of contemporary electronic systems. Electronics industries continue to move towards highly integrated devices with smaller feature sizes and higher currents with smaller footprint devices. Higher functionality comes with the price of high heat generation due to higher power dissipation. In general, heat from a system can be removed by conduction, convection and radiation. For most electronic applications, heat is primarily removed by transferring heat by conduction and natural convection through a solid medium. Polymer base Thermal Interface Material (TIM) is one of the most effecting media used in thermal management today.
TIM offer many benefits beyond exceptional thermal management such as electrical isolation for high power electronics, vibration dampening leading to improved reliability, tolerance stack up issue for mechanical parts leading to cost savings in product design, low outgassing to meet NASA outgassing criteria, just to name a few. Thermal interface material comes in different forms such as film, liquid and paste to fill gap from micron scale to millimeter scale. In this course, we will discuss some common types of TIM used in TIM 2 and TIM 1.5 applications. Value associated with each type of TIM and their common applications will be discussed here.