Webinar: 2022 Thermal Interface Material Innovations for Consumer Electronics

Parker Chomerics Consumer Electronics 2022 New Product Tech Roundup

Okay, everyone, welcome to the 2022 Thermal Interface Material Interventions for Consumer Electronics Tech seminar. Thank you all for joining. We're going to get started in just a few moments. I see folks are still joining our meeting, so give us about 10 seconds and then we'll get started. Okay, just a few housekeeping details before we begin. Please set yourself to listen only mode if you aren't already. We will be doing a question to answer at the end of the session. So go ahead, use that Q and A button. Submit your question anytime during the webinar, and we'll make sure to answer that question at the end. And then finally, this webinar will be recorded and the link will be sent to you within 24 hours after the webinar has ended. So don't worry, if you miss something, we will be sending it to you. So I'd like to today introduce the speakers. Ben, are you there?

I am. Hello, everyone. My name is Ben Nudelman. I'm the global market manager for consumer electronics for Chomerics, and I've been with the team for about four years.

Hello, my name is Dan Tuttle. I'm the thermal business unit product line manager for Chomerics, and I've been here for two years.

Okay, so we'll start today with a brief introduction about who Parker Chomerics is. And then we'll start talking about the engineering challenges that you face in this space, some market stats and trends, and then we'll get into the material innovation and all the products that we've been developing, and we'll continue to develop. And then we'll get into application examples and case studies. And finally, that all important question and answer at the end of our webinar. So stay tuned for that Q and A. And also, don't forget to submit those questions if you have any, during our webinar.

First, just a quick note about who Parker Chomerics is. We're division of Parker Hannifin Corporation, and we are the global leader in the development and application of EMI shielding and thermal interface materials. Our core competencies are in materials science and process technology, and Chomerics really does offer a market driven product development cycle where we feature integrated electronics housing. We're proud to offer custom engineered solutions and an integrated global supply chain management to all of our customers, which has been really especially useful recently. So with that, Ben let you take it away?

Yeah, of course. Thank you for the introduction, Jarrod. So Chomerics' technologies really fall into four general product families. The first is electromagnetic interference, or EMI shielding. This family includes all of our gaskets, metal products, paints, coatings, specialty materials, and laminates that are used in electronics to prevent EMI and protect signals from being disrupted by external or internal frequencies. Yeah.

And the second product family is thermal interface materials, the product line that is most near and dear to my heart. These materials are found on most circuit boards and are designed to transfer heat in order to prevent electronics from overheating.

Integrated and Optical Solutions is the third product family and uses our expertise in automated assembly to make tens of millions of complex parts every year for our customers, not just in North America, but in Europe and Asia as well. And lastly, engineered plastics round out the portfolio and are used mostly in the automotive industry. However, we also have conductive plastics that have been used across markets and industries. And so when it comes to a lot of the engineering challenges of designing the next generation of consumer devices, several factors really lead the way in terms of importance. Increasing use of automation in the assembly process is coupled with device level innovation demands that really have to address various practical constraints in terms of power limitations, computational and storage capacity.

Yeah, it's smaller, lighter, faster and cheaper. This is the mantra for the ever increasing demands of physically scaling down the size of our gadgets, which has pushed the electronics industry to its limits. The safety, reliability and lifetime of next generation small scale consumer electronics such as wearable devices and flexible electronics are major concerns. So not only are there physical constraints, but I'm sure as you all can attest we are feeling today's global supply chain challenges. Global capacity support and manufacturing is a must for expediting design cycles and bringing a new product to market every twelve to 18 months.

But at the end of the day, we hear about ease of automation or higher thermal performance or lower cost. But what do all these challenges really mean for you? What are the specific metrics and specifications of the product designs that need to meet these challenges? So, Dan, for example, can you share some of what we've heard from our customers?

Yeah, absolutely. As far as thermal performance goes, most applications can utilize a three to four Watt per meter K thermal connectivity gappad. But there are higher performance applications which require typically more than six Watts per meter K. And for properties such as hardness, we find that under measurement of 40 shore double oil or less, that's generally the sweet spot for conformability and thermal cap filters.

What about material form factors or packaging needs?

Well, first and foremost, parts must be integrated into high volume and high speed manufacturing practices, which means that they should be either dispensed or precut for picking place automation. And ideally, they would be manufactured globally. So logistics are less of a concern.

And of course, as in many industries, but especially so in consumer electronics, component costs are a key driver. So lower cost really means minimizing the individual cost of the thermal materials, either per kilogram or per size or per sheet on an individual part basis.

Right.

We wanted to briefly take a look at some of the market trends in the consumer space. So it's no secret that smart home and the Internet of Things are irrevocably intertwined, with IoT being one of the most disruptive trends. Now affecting many traditional industries. However, the rising number of consumer devices and sensors can be controlled by a smart algorithms such as machine learning tools and basically together form the Internet of Things, or IoT.

And to be clear here, though, the use of it in this context of private households defines a smart home. So the possibilities to automate processes in domestic context are almost unlimited.

So let this sit with you. By 2025, in just a few years from now, over 57% of households in the United States are expected to be smart homes. So that's more than 73 million households that are going to be smart homes and include things like smart speakers, smart security, smart thermometers and other house controls.

Yes. And the global spend on smart home devices is expected to double from 52 billion in 2019 to over 88 billion in 2025.

An interesting submarket of connected devices, wearables and fitness trackers are showing a lot of growth. People are taking control of their personal health information and the day to day monitoring of it. So growth has been nothing short of explosive, increasing almost 300% in shipments of fitness trackers and wearables in a three year period from 2017 to 2020.

And then there are the consumer drones, which while they represent a small percentage of the entire $1 trillion global consumer electronics market today, they have been seeing skyrocketing adoption over the last ten years. So with that backdrop of where the market is going for electronics enabled devices, let's discuss what that means for the thermal interface materials. Though I'm sure you are somewhat familiar on how thermal interface materials work, successful thermal management of high powered electronic components such as single or multi chip modules, integrated circuits with high heat dissipation ratings requires careful design engineering. The most important goal on electronic schooling is to maintain junction temperature from rising above prescribed levels.

Junction temperature is a good predictor for the useful life of the component. Thermal interface materials bridge the interface between hot components and a chassis or a heatsink assembly. As you can see here, the thermal interface material shown in purple helps to increase heat transfer and keep components cooler while really pushing out any kind of air gaps that can isolate and insulate components. Thermal gap pads and thermal dispensables like precurial gels and cure in place compounds are very common types of tins or thermal interface materials with an increased use in future designs. These are areas where Parker Commerce has developed next generation materials based on voice of customer and voice of market feedback.

Yeah, and thermal gap pads are conformable sheets of thermally conducted material. They're commonly used and cut to specific sizes and shapes.

Our gels, on the other hand, are dispensable materials that do not need any kind of curing after dispensing. Our thermal gap gel materials are a single component and will not change properties after being dispensed, meaning that they won't crack, they won't part in, they won't become brittle or flow out of the area onto which they are dispensed. On the other hand, our thermoform family of thermal dispensable materials represents a two component product that cures in place and is often used as a potting compound or an underfilled material with enhanced thermal properties. When it comes to new development in gappad technology, Pad 30 and Pad 60 stand out as the next generation materials with enhanced thermal and physical properties designed to be conformable with a low shore double zero hardness and to be used in a variety of thicknesses. Pad 60 represents a high thermal conductivity material for advanced processing power needs and high performance board components.

Absolutely right then, yeah. In fact, Pad 60 is rated to 31 short double zero, making it one of the softest six Watt pads on the market. It's actually over 40% softer than our existing six Watt thermal gap pads, and both Pad 30 and Pad 60 are available with an option of thermally conductive pressure sensitive adhesives and can be integrated into visual inspection and pick and place equipment to support programs with millions of pieces per hour and per year.

So in addition to the gas filler pads Pad 30 and Pad 60, Parker Comarix has actually designed new next generation thermal dispensable products for use in consumer electronics devices. The newest of which is Gel 75. At seven and a half Watts per meter Kelvin is the highest thermal conductivity single component precured thermal dispensable on the market. It is widely used for flexibility and automated dispensing abilities, maintaining all the same physical and regulatory properties of Chimeric's thermal gels. It represents another step in the advancement of dispensable thermal products.

Also new this year is Gel 37, so 3.7 Watt per meter K thermally conducted single component dispensable. It's designed to be low cost, yet a reliable workhorse. Both thermal gels are available in sizes from ten CC syringes up to five gallon tails or greater depending on the application.

Also, another recent thermal dispensable is what we call Zip 35 or Tier in Place 35. This material is a 3.5 Watt per meter Kelvin two component dispensable material developed to accept accelerated cure and ease of dispensing in mind. Curing to a shore a hardness of 55, it's meant to be an Underfill or potting compound in dense packages that can be easily reworked. But what does all this material innovation and development mean if these products don't provide solutions to the engineering challenges you all face and the ones we mentioned earlier?

Yeah. These new next generation materials are positioned to meet the stringent standards of the industry, taking into consideration fast prototyping, speed to market, high performance, and a global support network meant to assist with assembly, integration and mitigating supply chain concerns.

Yeah, that's a pretty good point, Dan. Material specific properties are relative and meant to provide solutions across the board for many of you. Gel 37, Pad 30, and Sit 35 in the three to four Watt per meter Kelvin thermal conductivity range are more than enough to provide effective heat transfer and do so at an attractive price point. But one of the things we also wanted to do is kind of give you a little bit of insight in our technology roadmap. Just because we've launched these new products does not mean we're done designing for the next generation of thermal interface materials. As we continue to work with you, our customers, we continue to develop materials that help to fill in the gaps, to help solve the solutions that you and your designers and your engineers face and are going to face in years to come.

Yeah, and our tech roadmap for the calendar year includes non silicone solutions for both gap pads and dispensable, as well as we're targeting even higher thermal performance at even lower cost standards. These materials are always in development. We have a plan today, but you are all key partners to our product development roadmap, so please reach out to us if you ever have any specific needs, we'd love to hear about it. We are constantly looking for feedback for next generation needs and requirements.

And as a reminder, please feel free to use the Q and A feature to ask questions or provide us input. We'll be sure to get to those at the end of the webinar. It's also good to show you some actual examples of what this real world product applications look like and what it means to be used in global automated assembly cells. You can see here our thermal gel being dispensed onto the PCB of an electronic device and then checks for quality and accuracy by an automated vision system.

Yeah, and here you'll also see a pick and place robot easily grabbing and placing a thermal gap filler. This is actually our Thermal Gap Pad 60. This is at 1 mm thick, easily handle. It doesn't need a fiberglass backing for rigidity, it's got a lot of good elasticity properties, very easy to handle, and it's a six Watt per meter K connectivity and very soft.

Now let's get into some real world examples of where these next generation materials are being used today. Like we mentioned, smart home devices are proliferating in our everyday world with popular products from both large multinational technology players and scrappy startups alike. There are endless smart home products available on the marketplace today. With each iteration and design cycles, smart home devices are expected to include more features and achieve greater performance, thus driving the need for increased thermal interface material performance. Most of these smart devices are connected by one of several connectivity standards and have chips dedicated to their interconnectivity. Some of the standards that you've likely heard of and work with are Zigbee, Zwave, Thread, Matter, and of course, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

Yeah, with multiple chips to effectively dissipate heat. Thermal Gap passing was selected as the Thermal Gap Pad solution in this instance as it provides an effective thermal exchange between the processor, the integrated heat spreader, the IHS and heatsink on smart home PCBs. As we have all been working and studying far more from home, there is a tremendous increase in need for higher bandwidth and better signal strength. Two simultaneous video calls and three other people streaming video requires whole home coverage.

All the modems, routers, signal extenders and mesh network modules are getting hotter, more powerful, and more compact, leading to the need for greater thermal heat dissipation requirements. And our last case study is on drones like we talked about. Like we mentioned, some of the statistics on earlier drones come in nearly every shape and size and are used for purposes from professional drone racing to photography and videography, and then also from delivery to surveillance and apping. But one commonality is the incredibly high processing power and energy needs from the rotors and internal electronics. Next generation thermal interface materials are used to cool the batteries and maintain longer operating times for all kinds of drones, whether they are multi rotor or fixed wing formats. Well, everyone, we hope you enjoyed this mini 2022 tech roundup of our new next generation thermal materials for consumer electronic devices. Now let's take a few minutes to answer some of the questions you all have asked. And as a reminder, you can continue asking questions as we're answering. And with that, we're going to get straight into the questions. So I want to let you all know that Dan is unfortunately unable to be here with us to answer these questions.

But you've got Jared and myself leading this part of the Webinar. So the first question we got is you mentioned that these materials are positioned for consumer products and consumer electronics, but are they applicable for other industries or high reliability electronics? And the answer to that question is yes, absolutely. So many of these products, while in this particular Webinar, we're positioning them for consumer electronics and things like smart homes, drones, and WiFi connectivity, many of them are very much applicable for things like telecom, automotive, defense, aerospace applications. And actually in the next few months, you'll see us put out a little bit more content geared towards those industries in those markets.

Nice.

All right.

The next question. Do you have any EMI gap pads with dielectric strength and good shielding with good thermal connectivity? So that's thermal pad coupled with the EMI shielding pad.

So at this point, that's actually one of the materials that we're looking at on our technology roadmap. We do have a few EMI materials. So specifically EMI shielding conductive elastomers that have a pretty high thermal conductivity because of their high metallic filler. So those are potentially materials to look at depending on applications. But I would say definitely look out for some materials in the near future and announcements about material innovations specifically geared towards either RF absorbing and thermal pads or EMI shielding and thermal pad combinations.

Good to know.

Yeah. The next question is on the roadmap. What do you mean by higher thermal performance? So that's a great question. As you can see, as we get into these new products, these effectively new materials that we've developed over the last twelve to 18 months, the thermal performance continues to get higher and higher. So with things like pad 60 at six Watts per meter Kelvin and gel 75 at 7.5 Watts per meter Kelvin, we're continuing to push the boundaries and increase those thermal performance needs. One of the things that we're really striving for and hope to have launched in the relatively near future is double digit thermal conductivity. So materials that get into that ten plus Watts per meter Kelvin, both as a gel or as a dispensable, as well as a pad, because those are the requirements that we're seeing from many of you all. Additionally, I wanted to mention that because of our global footprint, we're planning on developing these materials and manufacturing them not only in North America, but globally. So in various parts of the world, including Europe and Asia, just having a reliable source for many of these materials.

Good. Next question. Do we have any data about how our thermal gels perform under high vibration loads?

We actually do. So many of our materials actually a little bit of background and story for you. Thermal gels were actually originally developed for the automotive industry, so an industry that has high vibration, high reliability requirements. And so just about all of our gels go through a number of these tests, both internally as well as with our customers who end up testing them under their own requirements, whether it's specific automotive requirements or specific tier. Manufacturers have vibration or vertical application testing, as well as the fact that many of these gels have been used in aerospace and satellite applications where they will see significant forces from all directions. So, yeah, our gels do go through much of this testing and are typically able to withstand a pretty good amount of force in all directions.

Good answer.

One of the next questions we have is, are these materials meant for direct chip content, direct chip contact, and what about high performance applications? So yes, for many of you who are working on the board or the package level, many of these gels and pads are specifically designed for assembly either directly onto chips or onto heat sinks that end up meeting up against chips. So, yes, they are meant for chip contact. And I will add that in many scenarios, they can be dispensed either onto the chassis or housing or onto the board, really, depending on what the assembly process looks like.

All right. The next question. So what advantages do come.

Eric's thermal interface materials have, let's say, over a competitive material? I've seen thermal interface materials for other companies with similar thermal connectivity.

How are yours different?

Yeah, that's a good question. And we fully recognize that we are not the only players in this space, we do have plenty of competitors who are launching and developing and constantly innovating on material solutions. There are competing products out there. One of the things that we like to provide, especially as it's related to the consumer electronics, based on the fact that we're a global manufacturer, is that these materials are available to very high standards of quality, but also available across the world. Again, especially as many people have been working on resolving supply chain issues. And we take pride in the fact that our materials are developed and manufactured and we have access to raw materials and resources in various parts of the world wherever these materials need to be either consumed or prototyped. So that's one of the key factors that we as a global manufacturer can provide. Additionally, while we don't necessarily partner with specific dispense partners or dispensing companies, we do have very open and very good relationships with some of the companies that are associated with high volume manufacturing. Whether those are dispensing companies for some of our dispensable materials or pick and place technology for some of our pads, as well as secondary manufacturing, large contract manufacturers that do a lot of the assembly and work with these materials.

Yes.

Makes sense.

One of the questions we have is do you specify shielding effectiveness and how do you measure it? So this is actually associated with some of our other products. In this case, we're focusing mostly on thermal materials. But when it comes to the EMI materials that we also manufacture, we do specify shielding effectiveness, and we provide data on the shielding performance and grounding effectiveness of most of our materials on the data sheets. We test them either to specific IEEE standards as well as in house test methods that we publish. That, again, are very similar to those IEEE test methods and some of the test setups and rigs that are required.

Right. Then, I think I see one more question as it pertains to thermal. So when would you expect any non silicone thermal materials to launch and you share anything about what's coming down the pike?

Yeah. So I actually did want to mention that we currently do have nonsilicone thermal interface materials. So for example, our gel 25 NS is a 2.5 Watt per meter Kelvin non silicone thermal interface material. Again, it's a one component dispensable gel material that will not cure, will not Harden, will not flow or pump out of application. So we already do have a non silicone solution available in the market. Additionally, we're looking at higher performance materials, so. Yeah, certainly be on the lookout for that. I would say potentially as we kind of finalize some of the quality specifications and again, the ability to manufacture this material in high volumes look for that and probably the next six to nine to twelve months. So in the next year here.

Very good. Then I think that is it for all of our questions. Thank you for doing double duty there. Filling in for Dan. That was very good.

Of course. My pleasure. And again I just wanted to mention that we are going to continue putting out webinars as we develop new materials so specifically materials for positioned for industries like the automotive space, the telecom space, defense aerospace. Be sure to look out for those again some of the content will be the same and kind of looking at these thermal materials as well as new materials in the EMI shielding and grounding space and some board level shielding tech technology as well.

Very good. Thank you, Ben.

Thank you. All.

You got it. Thank you.

All. Bye.