Thermally conductive electrically insulating polymer nanocomposites

As the devices and components in the microelectronic systems are getting more and more miniaturized and integrated, thermal management becomes a critical issue in realizing assembling high power, multifunctional, and high reliability systems. Thermally conductive polymer composites play a very important role in thermal management. They can be thermal interface materials (TIMs) and electronic packaging materials. One important category of these materials is electrically insulating but thermally conductive polymer composites, which can be used to conduct heat but keep the devices being electrically insulated. Great efforts have been made on fabricating high thermal conductive insulating polymer composites and different fillers, mainly some oxides and nitrides have been adopted by researchers. However, the high thermal conductivity of the polymer composites may be affected by many factors, including intrinsic thermal conductivity of the fillers, aspect ratio of the fillers, processing methods, etc. In this chapter, we will review the current progresses of the thermally conductive electrically insulating polymer composites with introduction to various types of inorganic fillers and the factors that influence the thermal conductivity achieved in the composites.