A high capability vapor chamber in thermal management of high power and heat flux chips

One of the key technical bottlenecks in electronic device development was thermal management. Vapor chambers (VCs), as efficient heat dissipation devices based on phase-change, demonstrated significant advantages in addressing thermal challenges in confined spaces. However, with increasing chip size and integration density, both heat flux and thermal power surged concurrently, making existing VC technologies inadequate to meet these dual thermal performance requirements. This study systematically investigated the heat transfer performance of a large-area VC (projected area: 40,000 mm²) through innovative structural design. Two sintered copper powder wick structures, featuring particle sizes of 100 μm and 200 μm, were utilized. The results demonstrated that the VC incorporating 200 μm sintered copper powder wick structures exhibited a significant 35.4 % reduction in thermal resistance relative to 100 μm configurations. Under stringent cooling conditions with coolant temperature at 40 °C, the maximum power dissipation reached 1100 W (corresponding to heat flux of 220 W/cm²) while maintaining an ultra-low thermal resistance of 0.015 K/W. These results achieved concurrent improvement in both high heat flux and high-power dissipation, offering a potential solution for next-generation high-power electronics cooling.