High resolution steady-state measurements of thermal contact resistance across thermal interface material junctions

Thermal interface materials (TIMs) are meant to reduce the interfacial thermal resistance (R_T) across bare metal contacts in commercial electronics packaging systems. However, there is little scientific consensus governing material design for optimized thermal performance. This is principally due to the inability to separate the effects of the intrinsic material thermal properties from the magnitude of heat flow crossing the TIM-substrate junction (R_C). To date, efforts to isolate these effects using standard thermal interface material characterization techniques have not been successful. In this work, we develop an infrared thermography-based steady-state heat meter bar apparatus with a novel in situ thickness measurement system having 0.5 nm sensitivity. These in situ thickness measurements allow us to simultaneously determine R_T and R_C independently across current state-of-the-art TIMs with ±5% uncertainty. In this work, thermal pastes with bond line thicknesses ranging between 5 and 50 μm are used to illustrate the capability of the apparatus to measure extremely thin materials that are expected to achieve relatively low values of R_T. Results suggest that the contribution of the thermal contact resistance to the total thermal resistance can range from 5% to 80% for these materials. This finding highlights the need for appropriate metrology and independent measurements of R_C and R_T to better optimize thermal interface materials for a number of important electronics applications.