Carbon-nanofiber reinforced Cu composites prepared by powder metallurgy for thermal management of electronic devices

Electronic packaging involves interconnecting, powering, protecting, and cooling of semiconductor circuits for the use in a variety of microelectronic applications. For microelectronic circuits, the main type of failure is thermal fatigue, owing to the different thermal expansion coeffs. of semiconductor chips and packaging materials. Therefore, the search for matched coeffs. of thermal expansion (CTE) of packaging materials in combination with a high thermal cond. is the main task for developments of heat sink materials electronics, and good mech. properties are also required. The aim of this work is to develop copper matrix composites reinforced with carbon nanofibers. The advantages of carbon nanofibers, esp. the good thermal cond., are utlized to obtain a composite material having a thermal cond. higher than 400W/mK. The main challenge is to obtain a homogeneous dispersion of carbon nanofibers in copper. In this paper, a technol. for obtaining a homogeneous mixt. of copp