Thermal behavior of silicon-copper micro vapor chamber for high power LEDs

Abstract

Micro vapor chamber (MVC) for light emitting diodes (LEDs) can be designed and fabricated to enhance the heat dissipation efficiency and improve the reliability. In this paper, we used photoresist SU-8 and electroforming copper (Cu) to fabricate three kinds of wick structures, which are star, radiation and parallel ones, and the substrate is silicon with thickness of 0.5 mm. Electroforming Cu on silicon to make micro wick structure was a critical step, the ampere-hour factor was used, and accordingly the electroforming time was predicted. The composition of electroforming solution and parameters of electroforming were optimized too. After charging and packaging, thermal behavior tests were carried out to study the heat dissipation performance of MVCs. When the input power was 8 W, the parallel wick structure reached the equivalent temperature of 69.0 °C in 226 s, while the others were higher than that. The experimental results prove that the wick structures have significant influence on the heat transfer capability of MVCs.