A review of carbon-based thermal interface materials: Mechanism, thermal measurements and thermal properties

With the development of electronic technologies, electronic devices become smaller, while their power density increases dramatically. The resulting excessive heat requires excellent heat dissipation to ensure great performance of the devices. A good thermal interface material (TIM), with excellent bulk thermal conductivity and proper elastic modulus, which can fill the gap between contact surfaces, is of great importance to improve overall performance of thermal management in the electronic devices. Carbon-based materials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene (Gr), have attracted great attentions, due to their intrinsic high thermal conductivity. In this paper, carbon-based TIMs are reviewed, as well as the thermal conducting mechanisms and techniques to measure thermal properties for materials. The unique three-dimensional network of 3D-Gr provides not only high thermal conductivity, but also excellent mechanical properties, which makes it more competitive as TIM than CNTs and Gr. Furthermore, there is currently no universal characterization techniques, which are suitable to measure thermal properties of all TIMs. Hence, special attention must be paid to select a proper technique based on the measuring principle, in order to obtain accurate results. An outlook of the future challenges of the thermal interface materials is proposed at the end of the paper.