OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of the world's first thin cooling device designed for small, thin electronic devices.

Smartphones, tablets, and other similar mobile devices are increasingly multifunctional and fast. These spec improvements, however, have increased heat generated from internal components, and the overheating of localized parts in devices has become problematic. Fujitsu has developed a thin loop heat pipe, less than one millimeter thick, to solve this problem. This new device was developed using technologies for stacking metal sheets. It is capable of transferring approximately five times more heat than current thin heat pipes(1).

This technology will make it possible for CPUs and other heat-generating components to run cooler and to avoid concentrated hot-spots inside devices.

Details of this technology are being presented at the Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium 31 (SEMI-THERM 31), opening March 15 in San Jose, California.

For mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers, communications and data-processing speeds have accelerated, multi-functionality, such as with cameras, has advanced, and the devices themselves are becoming smaller and slimmer. The increased functions and decreased size of these devices has led to extremely dense packages, where the heat generated by each square unit has increased. Heat generated within the device can also raise surface temperature. In order to provide customers with a more comfortable mobile device, it is necessary to reduce concentrations of heat within devices.

With portable devices that cannot accommodate blower fans or water-cooling pumps, the conventional approach has been to install sheets of metal or graphite with relatively high thermal conductivity to transfer heat away from heat-generating components, thereby avoiding internal hot-spots. With increased amounts of generated heat, however, the thermal conductive properties of these materials alone are no longer sufficient in transferring heat.

Fujitsu has developed the world's first loop heat pipe less than 1 millimeter thick that can be added to small, thin electronics.