Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COOLGRAELE (COOLing electronic devices with GRAphene ELEctrons)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-08-01 do 2024-01-31
The global consumer electronics market, based on components including integrated circuits, batteries, high-speed (opto)electronic systems for data communication applications, etc., has an estimated value around a trillion dollars. One of the major challenges in state-of-the art electronics is thermal management, which aims at avoiding (local) overheating of devices and device components, in order to assure correct functioning and prolonged device lifetimes. The increasing miniaturization and density of components in (micro-)electronic systems leads to an increasing amount of heat creation that requires cooling. Furthermore, novel approaches such as three-dimensional chip stacking, require innovative heat dissipation strategies. Conventional thermal management in electronic systems mainly exploits materials based on aluminum and copper to dissipate heat, while more recently carbon-based materials have been receiving increasing amounts of interest. Particular interest was generated by the extremely high in-plane thermal conductivity found for monolayer graphene. This is around 2,000 W/m/K and therefore almost an order of magnitude larger than that of aluminum and copper, which is in the 200 – 400 W/m/K range. In this project, we aim to develop graphene-based heat dissipation layers with a thermal conductivity that is another order of magnitude larger and to exploit this in electronic devices to avoid breakdown.
We have fabricated a large amount of electronic devices with different types of thermal management strategies based on layered materials, and have tested their breakdown characteristics. The successful outcome was better thermal management due to the presence of graphene in these devices, as they show a significantly higher breakdown current than devices without graphene.
The proof-of-concept demonstration of improved heat dissipation due to the presence of graphene is a crucial step towards developing more generally applicable graphene-based thermal management in specific industrially relevant (opto)electronic devices.