Panasonic makes a 10 micron thick carbon phone heatsink--PGS is the new wonder material for devices

Semiaccurate ^ | Aug 15, 2013 | by Charlie Demerjian

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Panasonic was showing off one of the most incredible heatsinks on the market, 10µm ‘thick’ carbon sheets with 95% the conductivity of diamond. If you think that is impressive, the sandwiches they make with it were even more interesting.

At first the Pyrolitic (Highly Oriented) Graphite Sheet or PGS looks like a bit of dull grey cloth with no more sheen than an average cheap suit. If you pick it up it feels more like a lint-free screen cleaning cloth, quite soft, a bit slippery, but with none of the weight found in a screen cleaning mat. It really weighs nothing or next to nothing. This ~2*2 inch square cloth didn’t attract much attention at SemiCon in a hall full of industrial robots and wafer juggling mechanical arms but it should have.

[bigbob]

“dissipate over 200W or 198W, more than needed for a cell phone”

Ya think?

The material does look interesting; the quality of the technical reporting, as usual these days, is poor.

[rarestia]

The worst version, 700W/m, is 100µm, the best at 1900W/M is only 10µm.

Holy crap! That's insane, even for the "worst" version. A few low-power fans blasting air conditioned air on a sheet of this covering a couple of GPUs in a gaming rig, and you don't have to worry about messing with liquid cooling. Very cool.

[Talisker]

I thought the article was well done. The discussion about variations was particularly interesting - PGS + TSS (Thermal Storage Sheet), PGS + SSM (Semi Sealing Material) and PGS + Cu (Copper). And the PGS heat transfer efficiency being 95% of diamond in an ultrathin flexible sheet is, in itself, astounding.

[expat2]

The author knocks Cu for being electrically conductive, but fails to mention that graphite is also very conductive.

[OldNewYork]

These materials science posts are some of the most interesting and inspiring ones, among all the bad news elsewhere. Thanks.