NovoLINC's MaxLINC Sustains 400 W/cm² Heat Flux on Warped Silicon
NovoLINC says its MaxLINC thermal interface material sustained 400 W/cm² of uniform heat flux and 3,300 W of total power on a production-representative silicon test die with approximately 150 µm of warpage. According to the company, the junction temperature stayed below 90°C throughout the test.
- NovoLINC says MaxLINC sustained 400 W/cm² heat flux and 3,300 W total power on silicon with about 150 µm of warpage.
- The silicon junction temperature stayed below 90°C, using a single-phase direct liquid cooling cold plate from CoolIT.
- MaxLINC uses a proprietary nanostructured composite designed to keep thermal contact across non-flat surfaces.
- MaxLINC samples are available for customer evaluation and qualification.
What the demonstration showed
The Pittsburgh-based company, a provider of thermal solutions for AI computing, ran the test with a specialized single-phase direct liquid cooling cold plate from CoolIT, an Ecolab Company. NovoLINC reports that the complete thermal stack kept the silicon junction temperature below 90°C during the test.
The test die was described as production-representative and had about 150 µm of warpage. NovoLINC argues this matters because the result shows effective heat transfer even when die warpage creates difficult mechanical and thermal interface conditions. The total device power reached 3,300 W, which the company says shows MaxLINC can address the fast-growing thermal demands of next-generation GPUs, CPUs, ASICs and other AI accelerators.
Why warpage is a thermal problem
According to the release, silicon and package warpage are becoming more important thermal design challenges as AI processors move toward higher power and larger package sizes. Even small variations in flatness can lead to uneven contact between the semiconductor and the cooling system. That raises thermal resistance and can create localized hot spots.
NovoLINC says MaxLINC is engineered to deal with this through a proprietary nanostructured composite architecture that combines ultra-low thermal resistance with mechanical compliance. The material is designed to keep effective thermal contact across non-flat surfaces, moving heat from high-power semiconductor devices into advanced cooling systems.
The company says the platform is intended for use along the whole thermal pathway: direct chip-to-cooling interfaces, chip-to-package heat spreaders, and interfaces between packaged devices and cold plates or other advanced cooling hardware.
Comments from NovoLINC and CoolIT
NovoLINC CEO Dr. Ning Li said that AI compute is advancing toward multi-kilowatt processors and that extracting heat from large, mechanically complex packages is "becoming one of the industry's most difficult challenges." He said the goal with MaxLINC is to remove the thermal interface as a limiting factor and give chip, system and cooling designers more freedom.
CTO Dr. Sheng Shen said the company is working with firms across single-phase direct liquid cooling, two-phase direct liquid cooling and immersion cooling. In his view, the results show a thermal roadmap in which its interface technology combined with current and future liquid cooling systems can enable higher-power chips and AI server architectures.
Ben Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT, said the pairing shows that single-phase DLC can handle high-heat-flux processors "well into the next decade, without the cost and complexity of switching cooling architectures." He added that data center operators are making long-term infrastructure decisions today.
Availability and background
MaxLINC samples are available for customer evaluation and qualification, according to NovoLINC. The release gives no pricing or volume availability details.
NovoLINC was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University and says it has developed a proprietary nanostructured materials platform and a scalable manufacturing process. It lists high-performance computing, data centers, automotive electronics, aerospace systems and power electronics as target areas. The company says its technology development has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program.
For data center operators and chip designers, the claim is that the thermal interface need not be the limiting factor as power density rises, and that existing single-phase liquid cooling could remain viable for longer. These are the companies' own assertions from a single demonstration, and customer evaluation and qualification are still to come.
PR Newswire: NovoLINC Demonstrates 400 W/cm² Cooling on Warped Silicon with MaxLINC™
