Hot Spot Elimination by Thin and Smart Heat Spreader

Abstract

Heat pipes are recognized as an excellent heat transport devices and extensively investigated for applications in electronic cooling. Different types of heat pipes have been developed such as micro/miniature heat pipes, loop heat pipes and so on, and these heat pipes have been widely applied in the field of electronics cooling such as notebook, desktop, data center; as well as aerospace, industrial cooling field. However, in recent years the application of heat pipe is widening to the filed of hand held mobile electronic devices such as smart phone, tablet pc, digital camera etc. With the development in technology these devices have different user friendly functions and capabilities, which requires the highest processor clock speed. In general, high clock speed of processor generates lot of heat which need to be spread or removed to eliminate the hot spot. It becomes a challenging task to cool such electronic devices as mentioned above with a very confined space and concentrated heat sources. Regarding to this challenge, ultra thin flat heat pipe is developed; this newly developed heat pipe consists of a special fiber wick structure which can ensure vapor spaces on the two sides of the wick structure. In this paper a novel thin spreader is proposed to eliminate the hot spot; generally the proposed heat spreader consists of 0.20mm thick metal plate and ultra thin heat pipe of 0.40mm thickness soldered in its body. Maximum thickness of this spreader is 0.63mm. Metal plate is 60mm × 110mm in size; and the ultra thin heat pipe can be fabricated from different original diameter ranges from 2.0mm to 3.0mm Cu tube. Theoretical and experimental analysis have been done to evaluate this thin spreader. In addition, some real application of this spreader will be introduced in this paper.