Development trend of the Thermal Interface Material
High temperatures can have harmful effects on the stability, reliability, and lifespan of electronic components. There are often small gaps between electronic components and heat sinks, resulting in an actual contact area of only 10% of the base area of the heat sink, which seriously hinders heat transfer. The use of Thermal interface material to fill the gaps can significantly reduce the contact thermal resistance, and ensure that the heat generated by the heating electronic components is discharged in time.
With the advent of the era of the Internet of Things, the integration of electronic products continues to improve. In addition, the introduction of high-frequency signals and the upgrading of hardware components have led to a doubling of the number of connected devices and antennas, resulting in a continuous increase in power consumption and a rapid increase in heat generation. Thermal interface material have excellent thermal conductivity and strong environmental adaptability, which provide powerful help for the high integration and miniaturization of equipment, and are expected to become the most disruptive and transformational thermal management solutions.
In terms of industry, the electronics industry, represented by the three hot sectors, puts forward more and more demands for advanced thermal management systems and Thermal interface material:
Intelligent consumer electronics: The electronic products of smartphones and tablets have a tight and highly integrated structure, and the continuous improvement of heat flux density has put forward increasingly high requirements for heat management systems.
Communication equipment: communication equipment is becoming more and more complex, power consumption is increasing, and heat value is rising rapidly, which will bring huge incremental demand for Thermal interface material.
Automotive electronics: on the one hand, the working temperature of the engine electronic control module, ignition module, power module and various sensors is extremely high; on the other hand, the battery power of new energy vehicles is huge, and the traditional air cooling and water cooling are not enough to cope with the huge heat dissipation. There is an urgent and personalized demand for Thermal interface material.
In addition, devices used in aviation, aerospace, military, and other fields usually need to operate in harsh environments such as high frequency, high voltage, high power, and extreme temperatures, and require high reliability, long fault free working time, and extremely high comprehensive performance requirements for heat dissipation materials.
According to BCC research data, the global market size of Thermal interface material has increased from 716 million dollars in 2014 to 937 million dollars in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.4%. It is expected that the market size will reach 1.08 billion dollars in 2021. Among them, the Asia Pacific region will exceed 812 million US dollars, Europe approximately 113 million US dollars, North America approximately 101 million US dollars, and other regions approximately 54 million US dollars.
Thermal conductive polymer based composites have the advantages of low density, excellent dielectric properties, low raw material prices, and easy processing, but the thermal conductivity of polymer based thermal conductive composites is relatively low. Inorganic nano materials such as aluminum oxide, aluminum nitride, silicon carbide, Boron nitride and carbon nanotubes can effectively improve the thermal conductivity of polymer materials, but inorganic fillers will make polymer materials brittle and hard. At present, there is no good solution to this problem, and the international and domestic markets are basically on the same track.
The ideal Thermal interface material should have the following characteristics: high thermal conductivity, high flexibility, surface wettability, proper viscosity, high pressure sensitivity, good thermal and cold cycle stability, reusable, etc. Therefore, further issues need to be addressed:
Firstly, in the design of polymer based composites, more advanced reinforcement design is needed to improve thermal conductivity while ensuring mechanical properties;
Secondly, in terms of material preparation and processing, it is necessary to improve the interface bonding between fillers, reinforcements, and matrix to obtain an ideal composite material configuration;
Third, in terms of basic theoretical research, it is necessary to further understand the multi-scale phonon heat conduction, carrier conduction mechanism, phonon electron coupling mechanism, complex electron and phonon transport mechanism at the interface, etc., to provide theoretical basis for the design of Thermal interface material.
