Progress on thermally conductive adhesive for electronic packaging

In recent years, with the rapid development of large scale integrated circuit and micro-packaging technology, the electronic components and devices tend to be high miniaturization and intensity. The heat dissipation of electronic components has become more crucial to the overall system because it affects the lifetime, performance and reliability of electronic device[1]. According to survey, the reliability of electronic components decrease by10% with the temperature increase by 2°C[2]. Heat dissipation from microelectronics is most commonly performed by thermal conduction. For this purpose, most of metal materials are used due to their good thermal conductivity, but they have some disadvantages, such as high density, complicated processing technology and poor resistance to corrosion[3]. So many researchers direct their interest to the study of thermal conductive adhesives (TCAs). As we all know, polymer matrix have low heat conductivity, so how to improve the thermal conductivity of TCAs has aroused more and more researcher's attention. In this paper, the thermal conducting mechanism and heat transfer model were introduced. In addition, it's demonstrated in detail that the recent research advances in heat conductive adhesive in the field of fixation and packaging of electronic devices. And then the factors affecting thermal conductivity and methods of enhancing thermal conducting were presented, such as exploiting new filler, modifying the surface of filler and optimizing the technological conditions. Meanwhile, the direction of further development of thermal conductive adhesive in the field of electronics was pointed out.