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Copper/diamond composites have drawn lots of attention in the last few decades, due to its potential high thermal conductivity and promising applications in high-power electronic devices. However, the bottlenecks for their practical application are high manufacturing/machining cost and uncontrollable thermal performance affected by the interface characteristics, and the interface thermal conductance mechanisms are still unclear. In this paper, we reviewed the recent research works carried out on this topic, and this primarily includes (1) evaluating the commonly acknowledged principles for acquiring high thermal conductivity of copper/diamond composites that are produced by different processing methods; (2) addressing the factors that influence the thermal conductivity of copper/diamond composites; and (3) elaborating the interface thermal conductance problem to increase the understanding of thermal transferring mechanisms in the boundary area and provide necessary guidance for future designing the composite interface structure. The links between the composite's interface thermal conductance and thermal conductivity, which are built quantitatively via the developed models, were also reviewed in the last part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the microelectronics technology going toward its physical limits and the emergence of three-dimensional chip stack architectures, now more than ever there are both needs and opportunities for novel materials to help address some of these pressing thermal management challenges. In this paper, a high-thermal-conductivity insulative SiO2-coated nano-Cu particle is prepared for new-type underfill materials of high-performance microelectronics packaging. It was found that nano-Cu can be successfully coated with SiO2 by using the surface modification between cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide and silane coupling agent although nano-Cu particles have silicon-disordered property during the coating process of tetraethyl orthosilicate hydrolysis. Moreover, the thermal conductivity of epoxy mixed with nano-Cu@SiO2 as the packaging underfill is dramatically increased from 0.15 W/m K of the pure-EP and 0.60 W/m K of the EP/SiO2 to 2.9 W/m K due to electronic heat transfer, heat network and fast heat transfer center. It effectively releases the heat generated by the IC device, and the service life of the device is significantly improved from 63 min of pure-EP and 350 min of the EP/nano-SiO2 to 1039 min. The new material creates a challenging environment for keeping modern electronic devices cool, a critical factor in determining their speed, efficiency and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]