Thermal Composites

Advanced Thermal Management Materials

DiaCOOL Metal Diamond Composites combine excellent thermal conductivity with a Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) tailored to packaging materials and semiconductors.

Polishing (Ra<3μm) and cutting (water-jet, laser, wire-cut EDM) is possible. These easy to integrate materials offer advanced thermal management opportunities for applications such as:

• Integrated heat spreader and submount for laser diodes
• Advances for solid state lasers
• Heat Sink or Heat Spreaders in CPUs
• Base plates in high power electronics (e.g. IGBT base plates)
• Heat Spreaders for LED and HB-LEDs
• Heat Sink for RF and microwave packages
• Heat Sink for microelectronic packages
• Thermal management of high thermally loaded electronic components

DiaCOOL materials are of interest for applications such as heat sinks, heat spreaders, heat slugs or base plates to provide a reliable and sufficient cooling.

Geometries, Materials and Applications

DiaCOOL plates such as aluminium-diamond, copper-diamond or silver-diamond can be produced in various sizes between 10mm x 10mm and 150mm x 150mm, with thickness typically ranging from 2 mm to 20 mm. Due to the use of the sandwich technology DiaCOOL is able to provide plates with a high surface quality.

By using hot pressing technology to prepare these types of material it is possible to realize sandwich structures and parts with a certain complexity. Due to the use of the sandwich technology DiaCOOL materials are characterized by a high surface quality. Examples for applications of these types of material can be given from several areas of micro-, power- or optoelectronic devices such as: heat spreaders or lids for CPUs in high performance computing or server applications; cooling plates for LED or laser diodes; base plates for high power modules (e.g. IGBT).

DiaCOOL offers metal-diamond composites with properties tailored in a certain range, including Aluminium-Diamond, Copper-Diamond, and Silver-Diamond Metal Matrix Composites.

• 350 - 500 W/mK thermal conductivity
• 6 - 10 ppm/K thermal expansion
• Ra < 3μm high surface quality

Light-weight and easy to machine

Aluminium-Graphite materials are light-weight material solutions for the cooling of electronics in which the spreading of heat is of particular importance. Graphite flakes can be used as a cost efficient filler material for the preparation of composite materials which combine a reduced coefficient of thermal expansion with a high thermal conductivity. Due to the anisotropic properties of graphite and the used powder metallurgical processing, microstructural arrangements (orientation of graphite planes) are possible.

Aluminium-Graphite is an anisotropic material with excellent heat spreading properties combined with a Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) tailored to packaging materials and semiconductors.

This allows to customise the anisotropic behaviour of the material. In addition, Aluminium-Graphite composite materials are characterised by an excellent machinability.