Application of bulk synthetic diamond for high heat flux thermal management

Recently, the promise of major reductions in the price of synthetic diamond has allowed its consideration for use in electronic thermal management applications, such as MCM substrates, requiring many tens of grams of material (e.g., 100 mm square substrates, 1 mm thick). Because of the combination of extremely high thermal conductivity and electrically insulating nature, diamond is an ideal IC packaging or MCM substrate material; diamond can cool, through lateral thermal conduction to board edges alone, MCMs having many hundreds of watts power dissipation, and at the same time allow for a high density of vertical via interconnects through the diamond substrate. This diamond 3-D packaging approach is capable of handling, with a modest temperature rise, a power density of 200 Watts per cubic inch, which corresponds to a potential computational density of over 1300 MFlops per cubic inch or 83 GFlops in a 4" X 4" X 4" cube with current processor technology.