A Simulation Based Comparative Study on Thermal and Mechanical Performance of Silicone Grease and Graphene-enhanced Thermal Pad for Single-chip and Multi-chip Packaging Applications

Paper in proceeding, 2024

With the fast move of information technology, the requirements for chip computing power are gradually increasing, and increased chip operation temperature is one of the most important factors restricting chip computing efficiently. The cooling material plays a decisive role in reducing the surface and internal temperature of the working chip. Commercial heat dissipation materials use thermally conductive silicone grease, metal indium, thermal gaskets and so on. In this paper, the heat balance of the chip temperature, stress and strain using different heat dissipation materials are studied using FEM based simulation, comparing thermal conductive silicone grease with a recently developed graphene-enhanced thermal pad using the same power for single-chip and multi-chips packaging applications. The results show that in the case of a single chip packaging, compared with thermally conductive silicone grease, the heat dissipation effect is obviously observed and the high stress of the chip using graphene-enhanced thermal pad is significantly reduced. The simulation was also done after integrating a heat sink and a heat dissipation substrate. Even in this case, the same conclusion is achieved, i.e. that the chip temperature and the high stress of the chip were significantly reduced by using the graphene-enhanced thermal pad. In summary, the graphene-enhanced thermal pad has excellent flexibility and thermal conductivity, thanks to its special manufacturing process compared to the thermal paste and the use of graphene-enhanced thermal pad provides a better choice to solve the heat dissipation problem of future power chip cooling applications, especially for the heat dissipation problem of high-performance computing, AI and graphic chip-based electronics.