Thermal metamaterials exhibit thermal properties that do not exist in nature but can be rationally designed to offer unique capabilities of controlling heat transfer. Recent advances have demonstrated successful manipulation of conductive heat transfer and led to novel heat guiding structures such as thermal cloaks, concentrators, etc. These advances imply new opportunities to guide heat transfer in complex systems and new packaging approaches as related to thermal management of electronics. Such aspects are important, as trends of electronics packaging toward higher power, higher density, and 2.5D/3D integration are making thermal management even more challenging. While conventional cooling solutions based on large thermal-conductivity materials as well as heat pipes and heat exchangers may dissipate the heat from a source to a sink in a uniform manner, thermal metamaterials could help dissipate the heat in a deterministic manner and avoid thermal crosstalk and local hot spots. This paper reviews recent advances of thermal metamaterials that are potentially relevant to electronics packaging. While providing an overview of the state-of-the-art and critical 2.5D/3D-integrated packaging challenges, this paper also discusses the implications of thermal metamaterials for the future of electronic packaging thermal management. Thermal metamaterials could provide a solution to nontrivial thermal management challenges. Future research will need to take on the new challenges in implementing the thermal metamaterial designs in high-performance heterogeneous packages to continue to advance the state-of-the-art in electronics packaging.
The trends toward higher power, higher frequency, and smaller scale electronics are making heat dissipation ever more challenging. Passive thermal management based on high thermal conductivity materials or through-silicon vias (TSVs) may not provide sufficient cooling for hot spots reaching 1 kW cm−2, and active thermal management by thermoelectric cooling (TEC) may require large power consumption or suffer from a large off-state thermal resistance of thermoelectric materials. Here we address these issues by integrating a holey silicon-based TEC with a TSV that directly draws heat from a hot spot to combine active and passive cooling approaches. Our simulations of the TSV-integrated TEC demonstrate exceptional cooling performance, which reduces the hot spot temperature from 154 °C to 68 °C while dissipating a heat flux of 1 k W cm−2 and consuming 0.5 W for TEC operation. The off-state hot spot temperature, 154 °C, is 24 °C lower than that of the same TEC with no TSV, and the on-state hot spot temperature, 68 °C, is 67 °C lower than that of the same TEC with no TSV. We also investigate the cooling prospects of metal-filled holey silicon by modeling the electron–phonon coupling and size dependent transport phenomena, which can further increase the thermal conductivity anisotropy and improve the TEC performance depending on the metal-to-silicon interfacial resistance. These results show the combined passive and active cooling in TSV-integrated TEC offers effective hot spot thermal management solutions for advanced electronics.
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