Research Projects

The electronic industry is shifting towards smaller form factors, requiring the integration of various functionalities and new materials at a single platform. However, achieving greater compute performance is no longer the biggest challenge, as heat removal is a bigger challenge. Conventional solutions like composite graphite are not cost-effective and do not offer the required headroom for heat spreading. This project aims to address these challenges by developing graphene-based solutions. Composite graphite provides only sub-1200W/m-K of thermal conductivity, which is not sufficient for the power dissipation in typical small form factor mobile devices. The industry wants to scale this up to 8W to improve mobile device performance, which requires high thermal conductivity solutions to take heat flux out more efficiently. Graphene can offer thermal conductivity greater than 5000 W/m-K, and this project aims to exploit its unique properties to develop thermal management. The project aims to develop a multilayer stack of graphene with an optional h-BN layer in between, where graphene acts as a heat spreader and h-BN provides electrical isolation between two graphene sheets. This prevents the graphene stack from becoming graphite without significantly affecting its thermal properties. However, there are still gaps in developing an integrated solution, integrating graphene-BN super thermal conductors in mobile systems, studying heat spreading effectiveness, and developing large area graphene-hBN multilayer stacks at an industrial scale.