Research on passive cooling of electronic chips based on PCM: A review

With the rapid development of integrated circuits, chips are gradually miniaturized, but the number of transistors inside them increases exponentially, which increases the complexity and power density of the chip. The increase in power density makes the peak temperature of the chip higher, which reduces the chip's performance and shortens its life. Heat management using the latent heat storage(LHS) technique is nowadays employed to reduce the chip's temperature peak. This paper reviews the theoretical basis of phase change materials(PCMs) applied to chip thermal management technology and summarizes the application progress of PCMs in electric chip thermal management through the research of recent related literature. This paper is composed of three parts. The first part introduces different types of PCMs used in the field of chip thermal management, especially composite PCMs. The second part discusses non-embedded cooling solutions, focusing on analyzing the effect of using thermal conductivity enhancers (TCE) to improve the thermal performance of the PCM heat sink. The third part is a pioneering review of the research methods and conclusions of embedded cooling, showing that the application of PCM on the micro-scale has an important effect on suppressing the temperature peak of electronic chips.