Numerical analysis on the effect of microstructures on the thermal and mechanical properties of carbon fiber / Al2O3 thermal pad

Abstract

Thermal interface material (TIM) is pivotal for the heat dissipation in high-density electronic packaging. Recently, carbon-based materials have been used as important TIM located between the integrated heat spreader and heat sink in a flip-chip package, termed as TIM2. Due to the extremely high thermal conductivity of carbon fiber, the thermal pad with array of aligned carbon fibers presents high through-plane thermal conductivity, and the introduction of Al <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> O <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> particles also proves to facilitate the heat transfer and mechanical properties of the composites. In this work, we generate the microstructures of carbon fiber/ Al <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> O <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> thermal pad with high filler density (>70 vol %), and simulate their thermal and mechanical properties by GeoDict, an efficient software for modeling of materials, including visualization, property characterization, simulation-based design. To deeply understand the influence of the filler content and formula, intrinsic properties of the additives, and interfacial thermal resistance between various components on the effective properties of the composites, we employ orthogonal experimental design to give a comprehensive perspective with reduced computation cost. The simulation results and numerical analysis provide the potential to develop TIM2 with improved properties.