{"id":269,"date":"2010-03-17T09:35:54","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T14:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heatsinks.wordpress.com\/?p=269"},"modified":"2025-09-26T15:05:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T19:05:50","slug":"when-to-use-a-thermal-interface-material-with-your-heat-sinks-and-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/2010\/03\/17\/when-to-use-a-thermal-interface-material-with-your-heat-sinks-and-why\/","title":{"rendered":"When to Use a Thermal Interface Material With your Heat Sinks and Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The primary objective of most electronics cooling applications is to keep the junction temperature of a hot component within an acceptable level in order to increase the longevity and performance of the device.\u00c2\u00a0 In most cases, this requires some sort of heat spreader or heat sink to assist in the heat transfer.\u00c2\u00a0 This also almost always needs to include some kind of thermal interface material to reduce the resistance between the IC and the heat sink.\u00c2\u00a0 You have all kinds of choices really in this respect:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Grease (very good, and very messy)<\/li>\n<li>Phase Change Material (as good as grease but requires consistant pressure over time)<\/li>\n<li>Thermal Tape ( does a good job, cheap, tough to rework a chip when you have to remove the heat sink)<\/li>\n<li>Epoxy (please, do not go there!\u00c2\u00a0 Does the job, ruins your IC&#8217;s)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are alot of choices and frankly no one choice is best as they all have specific spaces where they can be used effectively.\u00c2\u00a0 ATS&#8217;s Thermal Lab has written a nifty white paper on this.\u00c2\u00a0 We published it in our QPedia Thermal Journal but are linking to it here.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 So, if you need to know more about this topic, please click to:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/heatsinks.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/09\/qpedia_0908_when_to_use_tim.pdf\">When to Use a Thermal Interface Material With your Heat Sinks and Why?<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The primary objective of most electronics cooling applications is to keep the junction temperature of a hot component within an acceptable level in order to increase the longevity and performance of the device.\u00c2\u00a0 In most cases, this requires some sort &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/2010\/03\/17\/when-to-use-a-thermal-interface-material-with-your-heat-sinks-and-why\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thermal-interface-material"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12464,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/12464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qats.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}