Modeling and design of monolithically coated thermal components

Abstract

Thermal management is key to the success of modern electronics as it primarily eliminates hotspots and reduces active and passive device temperature fluctuations. As long as the thermal and electrical designs constrain one another, simultaneous electro-thermal co-design will be required. The electro-thermal co-design will need to use trial-and-error approaches if the thermal design framework and rigorous understanding of the different operation modes is absent. Here, we provide a rigorous analysis of heat spreading within monolithically integrated thin metallic structures to develop design guidelines for efficient implementation in modern circuitry. We begin by outlining the different modes of operation for thin integrated heat spreaders, propose representative figures of merit, and develop an analytical/numerical model that predicts thermal operation at steady state under a wide range of configurations. We validate the accuracy of our model by comparing with Ansys Icepak computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations as well as experiments. After validating our model, we extend our analysis to encompass heat routers and heat shields to investigate their implementation and design strategies in two representative case studies. Our work galvanizes the co-design and implementation of innovative thermal devices with electronics to enable unprecedented power density and reliability.