Compliant thermal interface materials via introducing pendent chains into polymer networks for chip cooling

The thermal conductivity and compliance of polymer-based thermal interface materials are typically associated and mutually exclusive: improving thermal conductivity usually requires high fillers content, but this sacrifices compliance. In this work, we propose a decoupling strategy via introducing pendent chains into polymer networks for the fabrication of thermal interface material with high thermal conductivity (4.50 W/m∙k) and excellent compliance (high stretchability of 104% and low Young's modulus of 0.24 MPa). The compliance of thermal interface material is improved with the pendent chain content increasing. The potential application of the resulting sample in chip cooling is demonstrated and the temperature is reduced by almost 24 °C in comparison to commercial TIMs. Our work presents a promising way for thermal interface materials design with high thermal conductivity and excellent compliance.