News Cooler Master Builds World's Thinnest Vapor Chamber for Phones and Tablets

[Admin]

Cooler Master and Murata are building the world's smallest vapor chamber, with a height similar to that of a human hair.

Cooler Master Builds World's Thinnest Vapor Chamber for Phones and Tablets : Read more

 

[AnimeMania]

Would something like this need Thermal Paste between the two contact points?

 

[Eximo]

Yes, something to fill in the surface gaps. Either a very thin thermal pad or a thermal compound. I imagine compound between the ICs and the chamber and a thermal pad on the other side to carry it to the body of the phone/tablet.

 

[Endymio]

From the article:

The beauty of vapor chambers is that they use liquid instead of air alone to cool heat source. Liquid has more mass than air, allowing it to soak up more energy (i.e. heat)...

Sheeze ... there are at least three separate factual errors in the above statement. The largest, of course, is that heat pipes don't use "air"; they use a heat transfer liquid just like a vacuum chamber. You can in fact think of a vacuum chamber as a big flat heat pipe.

 

[zodiacfml]

false background information on VP, could have easily copied the facts from a good source. I don't know about this thin VP, performance advantage could be negligble due to less liquid available, might as well go with a copper sheet since cooling is limited by the surface area of the device.

 

[Endymio]

...might as well go with a copper sheet since cooling is limited by the surface area of the device.

You've forgotten that convection trumps conduction.

 

[cryoburner]

If it were just a thin copper sheet, you would have a hot spot directly behind the chip, with significantly less heat reaching the outer edges. A vapor chamber should allow the heat to get distributed more evenly. And it's not like vapor chambers and heat pipes contain much liquid anyway. It's mostly a vacuum inside them, with a residual amount of liquid vaporizing into a gas and recondensing to carry the heat elsewhere.

I suspect these things would be fragile, considering how thin they are. Perhaps they could be permanently adheared to the back side of a device's shell to increase their rigidity though.

 

[Co BIY]

Using these as the fins of an air cooler might be very interesting.

How to get useful capillary pull to the hot spots seems like a challenge to me

 

[cryoburner]

Using these as the fins of an air cooler might be very interesting.

It would probably be a bit too fragile for that. And too expensive to make for a viable product. Having it transfer its heat to a traditional fin stack would likely make more sense, but being thin wouldn't exactly serve much purpose for that. I also suspect that the thinness of this vapor chamber may limit the amount of heat it can transfer quite a bit, so it might not be suitable for something like desktop CPUs.

One thought I had would be to integrate a vapor chamber into the heat-spreader of a processor though. Chiplet-based designs have very little contact area between the cores and the overlaying heatspreader, which can limit their ability to transfer heat to a cooler. A vapor chamber under the heat spreader could potentially disperse that heat more evenly.

 

[Eximo]

I like that heatspreader idea, but I imagine that a more traditional vapor chamber would serve that purpose. Certainly an interesting experiment. I wonder if anyone has gotten a vapor chamber and slapped it on to a threadripper.