Carbon nanotube based solutions for on-chip thermal management

Abstract

The performances of microelectronic and optoelectronic devices are often severely limited by high temperatures and insufficient heat management. Therefore, when considering device fabrication and packaging, it is important to select materials based on their thermal performance. The increasing demand for more integrated functionality and miniaturization of microelectronic systems is pushing the limits of traditional cooling and packaging approaches. In fact, thermal management may well be the major bottleneck of the next electronics revolution. Efficient thermal management solutions are required at chip level as well as at system level. For example, heat dissipation is fundamental in microprocessor and integrated circuits (ICs) as in current mobile electronic or in server farms. Moreover, self-heating in applications like high power light-emitting diodes and solar cells affects their long-termstability. Therefore, novel cooling solutions are being developed based on nanotechnologies and functional nanomaterials. In particular, nanomaterials aremainly used as localized on-chip cooling solutions. They span from harvesting thermal energy, by using piezoelectric nanowires and super-lattice thin films, to heat spreading through graphene layers or nanocrystalline diamond, towards carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as thermal interface material (TIM) and heat sinks...