Thermal management of chips by a device prototype using synergistic effects of 3-D heat-conductive network and electrocaloric refrigeration

Ming-Ding Li; Xiao-Quan Shen; Xin Chen; Jia-Ming Gan; Fang Wang; Jian Li; Xiao-Liang Wang; Qun-Dong Shen

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-33596-z

Thermal management of chips by a device prototype using synergistic effects of 3-D heat-conductive network and electrocaloric refrigeration

Nat Commun. 2022 Oct 4;13(1):5849. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-33596-z.

Authors

Ming-Ding Li¹, Xiao-Quan Shen¹, Xin Chen², Jia-Ming Gan¹, Fang Wang¹, Jian Li³, Xiao-Liang Wang¹, Qun-Dong Shen⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, MOE Key Laboratory of High Performance Polymer Materials and Technology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.
² Materials Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, USA.
³ State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.
⁴ Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, MOE Key Laboratory of High Performance Polymer Materials and Technology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China. qdshen@nju.edu.cn.

Abstract

With speeding up development of 5 G chips, high-efficient thermal structure and precise management of tremendous heat becomes a substantial challenge to the power-hungry electronics. Here, we demonstrate an interpenetrating architecture of electrocaloric polymer with highly thermally conductive pathways that achieves a 240% increase in the electrocaloric performance and a 300% enhancement in the thermal conductivity of the polymer. A scaled-up version of the device prototype for a single heat spot cooling of 5 G chip is fabricated utilizing this electrocaloric composite and electromagnetic actuation. The continuous three-dimensional (3-D) thermal conductive network embedded in the polymer acts as nucleation sites of the ordered dipoles under applied electric field, efficiently collects thermal energy at the hot-spots arising from field-driven dipolar entropy change, and opens up the high-speed conduction path of phonons. The synergy of two components, thus, tackles the challenge of sluggish heat dissipation of the electroactive polymers and their contact interfaces with low thermal conductivity, and more importantly, significantly reduces the electric energy for switching the dipolar states during the electrocaloric cycles, and increases the manipulable entropy at the low fields. Such a feasible solution is inevitable to the precisely fixed-point thermal management of next-generation smart microelectronic devices.