Assembly and Reliability Challenges for Next Generation High Thermal TIM Materials

High power consumption & high input/out (IO) density are requested by modem electronic components such as high-density electronics, communication satellites, advanced aircraft, networking server and telecommunication devices. Challenges in the heat dissipation of an electronic package arise from the continued increase in power dissipation and power density of higher-power devices. A thermal interface material (TIM) with excellent heat conduction coefficient is applied between the heat source surface and the heat-spreading module. This is to efficiently dissipate heat from the heat source. Thermal performance of an assembled device becomes one of the most important quality factors in electronic packaging. Therefore, beside the thermal properties, a good mechanical strength of TIM is required. In order to meet demands for higher thermal performance and reliability strength needs in modem electronic devices, various new TIM materials were proposed by industry leading material suppliers. Some of the leading new TIM materials used for this purpose are graphite based and metal based materials where thermal conductivity could be higher than epoxy based TIM materials. In this paper, we will compare new graphite based and metal based TIM materials with existing epoxy based TIM materials and will discuss the various assembly challenges and reliability performance of these new TIM materials. Compare to commercial TIM, the graphite based TIM provide a heat conduction path in a direction perpendicular, metal based TIM is disposed in the Nano-particle metal by sintering to consist of heat conduction path. The junction temperature (Tj) of metal based TIM material shows 5 degrees C decreased than epoxy based material. Also, TIM coverage has been verified via scanning acoustic tomography (SAT) post reliability testing. Moreover, thermal simulations will be conducted and presented in this paper.