As devices get smaller and more powerful, the risk of overheating and burning out increases substantially. Despite advancements in cooling solutions, the interface between an electronic chip and its cooling system has remained a barrier for thermal transport due to the materials' intrinsic roughness.
Sheng Shen, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, has fabricated a flexible, powerful and highly reliable material to efficiently fill the gap.
"At first glance, our solution looks like any ordinary copper film, but under a microscope the novelty of our material becomes clear," explained Lin Jing, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The material, composed of two thin copper films with a graphene-coated copper nanowire array sandwiched between them, is extremely user-friendly.
"Other nanowires need to be in situ grown where the heat is designed to be dissipated, so that their application threshold and cost is high," said Rui Cheng, postdoctoral researcher in Shen's lab. "Our film isn't dependent on any substrate. It is a free-standing film that can be cut to any size or shape to fill the gap between various electrical components."
The "sandwich" builds out of Shen's "supersolder," a thermal interface material (TIM) that can be used similarly as conventional solders, but with twice the thermal conductance of current state-of-the-art TIMs.
