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Click to download the Thermal Bump whitepaper
Click to download Thermal Bump Frequently Asked Questions
Nextreme has integrated cooling and power generation into the widely accepted copper pillar bumping process used in high-volume electronic packaging. This breakthrough addresses two of the most serious issues in electronics today – thermal and power management constraints. Nextreme’s approach uses proven, fully scalable technology to deliver new, enabling functionality in flip chip applications.
Industry Issues
Today in electronics it is widely acknowledged that heat and power are gating progress. At the chip, package and system level, higher densities, more features, higher speeds and miniaturization are all contributing to more heat and higher power densities emanating from our electronics. There is often a misconception that system level cooling using heat sinks, fans, water cooling and even refrigeration, can ultimately solve these problems. While this is true technically, the power required to achieve the system level cooling solution is in of itself a fundamental limitation to achieving desired results – something that is often not considered. Nowhere is this felt more deeply than in PC data centers where the majority of power (and cost) is now going into cooling the electronics rather than actually processing data.
Breakthrough Solution - The Thermal Copper Pillar Bump
Nextreme’s technology addresses thermal and power issues at their core. Imagine a house with an overheated element on a kitchen stove. Rather than air conditioning the entire house to maintain the stove top temperature, it would be much better to cool the over-heating element locally and directly. Nextreme’s “thermally active” copper pillar bump enables exactly this approach for electronics. The result is higher performance and efficiency without higher system-level cooling.
Nextreme’s breakthrough technology extends the use of conventional solder bumped interconnects to provide active cooling of a flip chipped component using widely accepted copper pillar bumping (CPB) process technology. Nextreme’s process enhancement also enables power generating capabilities within copper pillar bumps for energy scavenging applications. Without this breakthrough solder bumps could previously only provide mechanical and electrical functionality.
Copper pillar bump (CPB) interconnect developed for high performance/high density electric interconnect is considered to be the future of flip chip. This is an industry accepted solution, already being used by Intel (Presler, Yonah), Amkor, Casio and others.
Nextreme’s thermally active copper pillar bump adds cooling, temperature control and power generation functionality to the CPB process. Nextreme’s process can be implemented in discrete or integrated applications.
World Firsts
Nextreme’s thermally active copper pillar bump has already demonstrated a number of world firsts: a temperature difference of 60ºC has been achieved across the 60 µm (0.06 mm) high Nextreme CPB by running an electrical current through it; the Nextreme CPB demonstrated maximum power pumping capabilities exceeding 150 W/cm2; when subjected to heat the Nextreme CPB has demonstrated the capability to generate up to 10 mW of power per bump.
The Nextreme CPB devices have passed initial reliability testing and are currently entering into full GR-468 reliability testing. Nextreme has previously sampled engineering prototypes and will be in pilot production in December 2007.
Contact us for evaluation, analysis, prototype, test, verification or production assistance, or call us at +1 919-597-7300.
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