Successful 15th Annual IMAPS Advanced Technology Workshop on Thermal Management Posted by Dave Saums Monday, October 15th, 2007

The International Microelectronics Packaging Society sponsored the fifteenth annual Advanced Technology Workshop on Thermal Management in San Jose CA USA, on September 24-27. This very successful Workshop included 34 technical presentations from speakers from around the world. The total of 129 attendees included thermal engineers from Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Puerto Rico, and Singapore, as well as from the United States.

Technical session topics included a substantial number of presentations on advanced and developments in thermal interface materials (TIMs) and Thermal Interface Material testing; advanced liquid cooling for computing and telcom systems, including boiling and refrigerant performance; system-level cooling; advances in air cooling and in the latest developments in synthetic jets as cooling devices; data center cooling and data center temperature measurement techniques; testing techniques for semiconductor die hot spots and heat pipe performance; high thermal conductivity engineered thermal materials; and developments and design guidelines for vapor chambers and heat pipes. The traditional market drivers session which has been included since 2000 included presentations on technical and market issues driving developments in engineered thermal materials, computing system liquid cooling, and illustrating far-reaching trends in the development of both computing systems and the power and thermal requirements of data centers.

Indium Corporation presented developments in metallic thermal interface materials (TIMs) and reliability data for high performance metallic TIM materials versus silicone thermal greases; this presentation was given by Jordan Ross and Amanda Whittemore. The thermal interface material session consisted of seven technical presentations on material requirements, testing and evaluation, and developments and generated a substantial amount of discussion, as this is always an important session in this Workshop.

A key component of this Workshop is quite unusual among IMAPS events, with an engineering graduate student stipend competition that is made available to mechanical and electrical engineering masters and doctoral candidates worldwide. Originally proposed and funded by H-P Laboratories, several other firms and the IMAPS Foundation now also contribute to the event in order to recognize excellence in graduate student thermal engineering projects and to introduce many more engineering graduate students to the various industry events sponsored by IMAPS. This graduate student competition has now been held for three years and the sponsoring companies have included H-P Laboratories, Electronic Cooling Solutions Inc., Celsia Technologies LLC, DS&A LLC, Flomerics Inc., and The IMAPS Foundation.

The IMAPS ATW on Thermal Management has been held each year since 1992 and is the longest-running and most successful of the advanced technology workshops offered by IMAPS, a non-profit engineering society focused on every facet of electronics packaging worldwide. Originally held each year in the spring in Colorado, this ATW has been held in Palo Alto or San Jose since 2000 and draws strong support and participation from Silicon Valley. The organizing committee for the ATW Thermal Management is made up of eight volunteers from computing systems OEMs, academia, engineering consulting firms, and electronics thermal management vendors, all of whom have extended experience in the industry.

Posted by Dave Saums at 11:57 AM (October 15th, 2007)

Tags: