Thermal Designs Using Vapor Chambers for Smartphones, Laptops, HPC, and Power Elec. (I: Overview)

It is the Part I (overview) of a tutorial that teaches engineers how to design thermal systems using vapor chambers. A vapor chamber is also known as a 2D heat pipe; it is becoming a common component used to enhance thermal management. The annual shipments of vapor chambers for smartphones and laptops will reach over 100M units per year soon. Driven by such an application, vapor chambers become thin, light and low-cost alternatives to heat pipes and graphite and metal heat spreaders. However, most of thermal engineers do not know how to design their thermal systems using vapor chambers. For example, a vapor chamber’s performance can drop from 6,000 W/mK to 1,000 W/mK if its next cooling level is not arranged properly. In another case, a vapor chamber’s mass can increase from 30 to 90 grams if the specifications are not defined correctly. This tutorial will review different features offered by current and future vapor chambers with our thermal ground planes (TGPs) as examples. These features are temperature uniformity, maximum power, thickness, size, flexibility, bendability, foldability, RF transparency, heat flux, and cost. In addition, we will illustrate several cases to gain an insight into a thermal design using vapor chambers for smartphones, laptops, high performance computing (HPC), power electronics, and other applications.
Ryan J. Lewis is the Director of R&D in Kelvin Thermal. He is the lead inventor of major patents awarded to Kelvin Thermal for flexible thermal ground planes (TGPs). One of his notable accomplishments is the demonstration of the world’s thinnest vapor chamber with a thickness of only 0.15mm in 2018. In addition, he demonstrated a feasible polymer TGP in 2015, which was further enhanced in 2020. In 2021, Dr. Lewis’ team developed a high power TGP good for over 1,000 Watts and another novel foldable TGP proven reliable over 150,000 folding cycles with a bending radius of 3mm. Dr. Lewis has designed over 20 different TGPs for customers.
Y. C. Lee is the President and CEO of Kelvin Thermal. Dr. Lee is recognized as a world leader in thermal management, packaging and interconnect technologies for microsystems integrating microelectronic, optoelectronic, microwave, microelectromechanical and nanoelectromechanical devices. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder. At CU, he was the S. J. Archuleta Professor from 2011 to 2020 and the Director of DARPA Center on Nanoscale Science and Technology for Integrated Micro/Nano-Electromechanical Transducers (iMINT) from 2006 to 2012. Dr. Lee received the ASME InterPACK Achievement Award in 2013. He was the Editor of ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging from 2015 to 2020.

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Amazing work!