Name: PG150A: Cutting Edge Advances in High-Performance Thermal Interface Materials | Presented by Fujipoly
Uploaded: 2026-05-19T19:30:12.606Z
Duration: 39 min
Description: PG150A: Cutting Edge Advances in High-Performance Thermal Interface Materials | Presented by Fujipoly

Transcript for "PG150A: Cutting Edge Advances in High-Performance Thermal Interface Materials | Presented by Fujipoly": In a data center, uptime is everything. And as AI and high performance computing push rack densities higher, heat becomes an ever increasing threat you can't afford to ignore. That's why more operators are moving to direct to chip liquid cooling, delivering coolant straight to cold plates on the processor, removing heat at the source with far greater control than air cooling. But the architecture is only part of the answer. The cooling fluid you choose can determine whether your system stays stable or whether contamination, fouling, corrosion, or other fluid related failures put uptime at risk. Dow Frost LC heat transfer fluid is specifically formulated for liquid cooled, direct to chip applications, delivering efficient heat removal while protecting critical hardware. 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So protect your data center uptime now and into the future. Choose Dow Frost LC heat transfer fluid for direct to chip cooling and build a data center cooling loop engineered for reliability, stability, and performance. Welcome back to Thermal Live. We've reached the final session of our spring twenty twenty six event. This session is all about Fuji Poly's high performance TEM called PG one fifty a. We're gonna explore its key applications, its compression and heat transfer characteristics, and some best practices when using it. Our presenter, James Pato, is a sales engineer at Fuji Poly where he brings over ten years of experience working in thermal interface. Fuji Poly is a leading manufacturer of silicon based thermal interface materials, constantly pushing the boundaries of performance to meet evolving market needs. James will be fielding your questions at the end of the presentation, so send them in in the q in the q and a tab to the right of the chat, and we'll do our best to answer as many as we can. James, thanks for being with us today, and welcome to Thermal. First, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this webinar. We hope to demonstrate our newest offering in thermal interface materials in p g one fifty a. We'll demonstrate when and how to use it in your applications and how capable it is as a thermal interface material, as well as how well it holds up against its competitors. My name is James Pado. You might remember me from such thermal lab webinars as selecting the right thermal interface material for your application. I'm a sales engineer with Fuji Poly America, a graduate of the mechanical engineering program from San Jose State University. With Fuji Poly, I have over ten years of experience working in thermal interface and working extensively with customers to find solutions to thermal interface challenges in a wide variety of environments, including automotive, medical, aerospace, and handheld electronics. I'm based out of our customer engineering resource center in San Jose, California. And currently, I am part of a team working to establish dispensable materials r and d at the customer engineering resource center. Fuji Poly stands out in the industry for its expertise in thermal interface materials, elastomer connectors, and custom silicone extrusions. Compared to their best known competitors, Fuji Poly focuses on high performance solutions tailored to specific industrial needs. Bujipoli is worldwide. Our world headquarters is based in Nagoya, Japan. We serve customers from 14 different locations around the world with a new factory being opened up in the in The Netherlands. Two of these locations are here in The US, the customer engineering resource center in San Jose, California, and the American headquarters and factory in Carteret, New Jersey. Serving Western North America at the customer engineering resource center, we offer application specific expertise to all of your thermal management needs. There, we can provide tailored thermal and mechanical testing to answer any questions you may have using Fuji Poly materials in your application. We also can provide custom cut samples for applications that would otherwise require steel wool tooling. The customer engineering resource center is an extension of Fuji Poly America, which operates out of Carteret, New Jersey. There, orders can be placed for raw sheets, dispensable materials, and tapes, among other things, as well as cut parts. They also offer similar testing expertise to serve Eastern North America as well as South America. Fuji Poly offers a number of product lines. Our thermal interface materials product line falls under the SARCON product name. SARCON product family consists of five material categories. Gap filler pads, sometimes referred to as gap pads or gel pads, are viscoelastic pads that have some elastic qualities and are designed to be used under compression. Putty pads, much like gap filler pads, are designed to be used under compression, but due to less cross linking within the material are far more compressible. Form and place gap fillers, which are dispensable putty pastes that are available in curing and non curing variations. Thermal greases, which are dispensable materials designed to fill what are called zero gap applications, essentially surface on surface contact with high amounts of compression force, and thin film material, also called rubber gasket material, can be used in place of thermal greases still requiring significant compression force to perform adequately. Now let's discuss PG one fifty a. It's a 15 watt per meter kelvin putty pad material. Though it has high thermal conductivity, the material is electrically nonconductive using ceramic fillers to conduct heat through the material. The material is naturally tacky on both sides, so adhesive is not used to adhere the pad to the desired surface. Unfortunately, we do not add adhesive to the surface for better adhesion. The reason for this is historically the surface has shown to not take weld adhesive, as well as the likely reduced thermal performance coming from the added layer of adhesive. The sheet size is 200 millimeter by 300 millimeter standard. This sheet size can be customized from our factory in Japan. Is available in minimum thickness of point three millimeters, followed by point five, one, one point five and two millimeters. If thicker variations or thicknesses in between the standard ones provided are needed, they can be custom made, but it also can be stacked with no ill effect on the thermal performance. Like all of our silicone based materials, the recommended operational temperature range is from four minus 40 c to one fifty c. As you will see, the current flame rating states p g one fifty a is v zero equivalent according to the UL 94 spec. The material is currently being evaluated by UL to make this designation official, but through an internal testing, we are confident it will have this rating. The data sheet will will be updated once it officially receives the V zero rating. PG one fifty a is a soft material, but can be handled fairly easily by hand. The material can be picked up with both liners removed, as well as handling with a top liner still attached to then be removed after placement using the applicator's fingers or with tweezers. Pick and place application has not yet been fully evaluated, but it is likely to be a usable application option. Now let's discuss p g one fifty a. It's a 15 watt per meter kelvin putty pad material. Though it has high thermal conductivity, the material is electrically nonconductive using ceramic fillers to conduct heat through the material. The material is naturally tacky on both sides, so adhesive is not used to adhere the pad to the desired surface. Unfortunately, we do not add adhesive to the surface for better adhesion. The reason for this is historically, the surface has shown to not take weld adhesive, as well as the likely reduced thermal performance coming from the added layer of adhesive. The sheet size is 200 millimeter by 300 millimeter standard. This sheet size can be customized from our factory in Japan. Is available in minimum thickness of point three millimeters, followed by point five, one, 1.5, and two millimeters. If thicker variations or thicknesses in between the standard ones provided are needed, they can be custom made, but it also can be stacked with no ill effect on the thermal performance. Like all of our silicone based materials, the recommended operational temperature range is from 40 minus 40 c to one fifty c. As you will see, the current flame rating states p g one fifty a is v zero equivalent according to the u l 94 spec. The material is currently being evaluated by UL to make this designation official, but through an internal testing, we are confident it will have this rating. The datasheet will will be updated once it officially receives the v zero rating. PG one fifty a is a soft material, but can be handled fairly easily by hand. The material can be picked up with both liners removed as well as handling with the top liner still attached to then be removed after placement using the applicator's fingers or with tweezers. Pick and place application has not yet been fully evaluated, but it is likely to be a usable application option. Now let's discuss PG 150 A. It's a 15 watt per meter kelvin putty pad material. Though it has high thermal conductivity, the material is electrically nonconductive, using ceramic fillers to conduct heat through the material. The material is naturally tacky on both sides so adhesive is not used to adhere the pad to the desired surface. Unfortunately, we do not add adhesive to the surface for better adhesion. The reason for this is historically the surface has shown to not take weld adhesive, as well as the likely reduced thermal performance coming from the added layer of adhesive. The sheet size is 200 millimeter by 300 millimeter standard. This sheet size can be customized from our factory in Japan. Is available in minimum thickness of point three millimeters, followed by point five, one, one point five and two millimeters. If thicker variations or thicknesses in between the standard ones provided are needed, they can be custom made, but it also can be stacked with no ill effect on the thermal performance. Like all of our silicone based materials, the recommended operational temperature range is from 40 minus 40 c to one fifty c. As you will see, the current flame rating states p g one fifty a is v zero equivalent according to the UL 94 spec. The material is currently being evaluated by UL to make this designation official, but through internal testing, we are confident it will have this rating. The data sheet will will be updated once it officially receives the v zero rating. PG one fifty a is a soft material, but can be handled fairly easily by hand. The material can be picked up with both liners removed, as well as handling with the top liner still attached to then be removed after placement using the applicator's fingers or with tweezers. Pick and place application has not yet been fully evaluated, but it is likely to be a usable application option. Those of you who are not familiar with the Fuji Poly Sarcon product line may have questions about what sets a putty pad material such as p g one fifty eight apart from our other gap filler pads, and why would one be used versus the other. Like gap filler pads, putty pads can be used in air gaps that aren't making surface surface contact. Though, due to less cross linking in the material, putty pads are more compliant, making them ideal for applications with wide gap tolerances, as well as surfaces with differing heights. Typically, a good rule of thumb for deciding between the use of a gap filler pad and a putty pad is the following: if the material is required to be compressed by 10 to 30%, a gap filler pad is best suited here. If the material is required to be compressed by 10 to 50% or more, putty pads are best suited for this application. Here we give an example of an application that would be best suited for using a putty pad like PG-one 158. The application calls for filling a gap between a component and a heat sink. The given nominal gap for the application is 1.25 millimeters, with a tolerance of plus or minus point three millimeters. This makes the maximum gap 1.5 millimeters and the minimum gap 0.95 millimeters. The upper tolerance requires that the material thickness be two millimeters, as well as the tolerance requiring the material to be compressed by 22 to 53%. A putty pad should be used here. It's very easy to design your pad for the assembly. Take the example pictured here. The final gap is point four millimeters, and the area needed for coverage is 15 millimeters by 15 millimeters. The overall volume of this space is 90 millimeters cubed. Based off of our given force curve, perhaps you were to select one millimeter thick p g one fifty a. How much would you need to get adequate coverage to cover the 15 millimeter by 15 millimeter space when compressed down to point four millimeters? First, you remove the thickness from the determined volume from earlier, and you square root the remaining area. This gives you a value of 9.486 millimeters. To simplify the dimension for manufacturing, you could round the value up to 9.5 millimeters. One thing to bear in mind is that the material disperses as it's being compressed as opposed to collapsing down. The estimated bond line thickness of p g one fifty a is point one millimeter, though it's not recommended to aim for this thickness. Either way, this can affect how an engineer may design a pad to be placed and used in their assembly. Here you see two sets of samples, p g one fifty a with a point five millimeter thickness with a diameter of approximately 20 millimeters, and another sample of p g one fifty a with a two millimeter thickness with a diameter of approximately 10 millimeters. The goal of this test was to compress both to a gap of point two five millimeters, and, ideally, they would end up providing the same coverage. As you can see, they almost match up. The interesting thing is that the thicker, smaller diameter pad required less force to get to the same final gap as the point five millimeter sample as can be seen in the graph. The red curve is the point five millimeter thick sample compressed 50%, and the blue curve is the two millimeter thick sample, smaller sample, compressed 88%. All food for thought for designing. A common question we get in regards to our materials revolves around re reworkability. Some materials we offer allow for more reworkability than others, but typically speaking, PG one fifty a is not one of those materials. Once applied, Sarcon p g one fifty a material is not recommended for reuse as it has low material rigidity. As it has good replaceability, I e easily peels off the surface, we recommend that new material is used in your assembly. To replace, first when the electrical device is at room temperature, slide, pull, or twist the heat sink or heat spreader to separate. After separation, scrape both surfaces with a putty knife or cleaner wipe to remove the bulk of the PG one fifty eight material. For best results, clean both surfaces with a putty knife or a cleaner wipe and apply a new pad material. Basically, it's not necessary to remove all the traces of p g one fifty a, but using a little isopropyl alcohol wouldn't hurt. A common question we get in regards to our materials revolves around re reworkability. Some materials we offer allow for more reworkability than others, but typically speaking, p g one fifty a is not one of those materials. Once applied, Sarcon p g one fifty a material is not recommended for reuse as it has low material rigidity. As it has good replaceability, I e easily peels off the surface, we recommend that new material is used in your assembly. To replace, first, when the electrical device is at room temperature, slide, pull, or twist the heat sink or heat spreader to separate. After separation, scrape both surfaces with a putty knife or cleaner wipe to remove the bulk of the PG one fifty eight material. For best results, clean both surfaces with a putty knife or a cleaner wipe and apply a new pad material. Basically, it's not necessary to remove all the traces of PG one fifty a, but using a little isopropyl alcohol wouldn't hurt. Earlier, I mentioned that PG one fifty a is typically not recommended to be used in rework conditions. Under most circumstances, this is true, but there are ways to get some reworkability from the material. This involves using PG one fifty a with a laminated surface treatment. At Fuji Poly, we offer two of these surface treatments. One is the E0 surface, where a thin layer of PET plastic is permanently bonded to the material surface. The other is the aluminum surface, where we laminate a thin layer of aluminum foil to the material surface. This allows you to get some reworkability in applications that require the p g one fifty a to be slid into place, or if the assembly requires the material to be to stay in place while releasing from the other side with no damage. Typically the best thermal performance comes from using the aluminum coating, while the most robust is the PET plastic. Where the surface treatment somewhat falters is with the softness of PG 150 A, not allowing enough pressure to be exerted on the aluminum to reduce the contact resistance. As a result, the thermal performance is reduced by half, as you can see with the table here. Bearing in mind that the test was done with the one millimeter thick material, it's possible that with the thinner variations of PG one fifty a, this reduction would be less stark since more force would be needed to compress the material. Ultimately, this treatment may be better suited for stiffer materials that we offer. With many companies pushing the limits of thermal and mechanical performance, engineers may have difficulty evaluating which material is better suited for them outside of curated data and connectivity numbers. Let's look at how PG 158 compares to a number of better materials with performance rated at, or in some cases, better than our own. Here we performed our standard compression test on one millimeter thick samples. We measured the compression force needed to reach 10 to 50% compression. We also included a sixty second hold at 50% compression to measure how much material relaxes once compression is stopped. From the graph, the outlier among the force curves is one of the competitors 15 watt per meter kelvin materials. Showing that it's mechanically very stiff, making it not the most ideal for applications with a wide range of gap heights. P g one fifty a and the other two competitor materials stay within range of each other up until the 20 to 30% compression mark. At this point, 17 watt per meter kelvin material compression force begins to climb away from PG one fifty a and the 18 watt per meter kelvin material force curves. Overall, p g one fifty a and the competitors 18 watt per meter kelvin material have similar mechanic performances under our compression tests. The other performance metric to compare is thermal resistance. The first table you see is comparing all four materials with a one millimeter initial thickness with a standard sweep of pressures of 100, 300, and 500 kilopascals. You'll notice that throughout the test, the best performer was the Fuji Poly PG one fifty a. Competitors 18 watt Premier Kelvin material did not start the test as well, but with added pressure gained ground and ultimately seemed comparable to the p g one fifty a sample. Competitors 15 watt per meter kelvin and 17 watt per meter kelvin materials did not perform as well though throughout the test. Keeping the force curves we discussed in the previous slide in mind, the higher resistance value may be a result of these materials being harder than PG 150 a and a competitor's 18 watt per meter Kelvin material. A more accurate comparison would be testing thermal resistance of each material at the same gap. The second table shows the results of the testing the thermal resistance with this in mind. The test was performed with each material compressed to 50% of its original thickness. Looking at the table, thermal resistance values appear closer together but still follow a similar pattern to the previous table's data. PG 150 a showing the best results of the four materials tested. The other three materials appear to perform relatively similar to each other, but the 18 watt premier kelvin material seem to perform better than the other two competitors materials. And then finally the competitors 17 watt premier kelvin material showed better performance than the competitor's 15 watt premier kelvin material. Again, thank you for attending this webinar. Through this webinar, we hope you were able to come away with a brief bit of knowledge of Fujikali as a company and what we offer each customer. We hope you gained a better understanding of our newest offering in thermal and materials in p g one fifty a, learned when and how to use it in your applications, also how capable it is as a thermal interface material as well as how well it holds up against its competitors. Fuji Poly is a worldwide organization and can meet our customers' needs where they are. To speak with one of our experts or request samples or a quote, feel free to find us at www.fujipoly.com, and we'll be happy to get back to you to further discuss your needs. Alright. Thanks, James, for that presentation. You can access the slides for this presentation in the docs tab next to the chat area. And, I'm happy to welcome now to the stage, James Pado to answer some questions. James, And thanks ready? for yes. Thanks for having me. Right on. Let's get right to it. Our first question asks, what is the shelf life of p g one fifty a? Yeah. So there's, it's kind of, two there's two answers there. So the short answer from from, our factory is one year from date of sale. That means, essentially, it's more of a warranty period than a true shelf life. As far as the material goes, as long as you're keeping it within, within the recommended operation temperature, which is minus 40 c to one fifth plus one fifty c, material really doesn't degrade. So, as long as you're storing it and keeping it, keeping it there, it should be I mean, it should have, lifetime storage, really. Excellent. Okay. The next question says, my application has the material going through heavy vibration. Do you have performance data for p g one fifty a undergoing shock and vibe? Yeah. So, we are just starting to do, testing for shock and vibe for all of our materials. We've noticed that, there is usage or there is desired usage in things that that are high shock and vibe like, aeronautical and and automotive. We currently don't have that data, but we're currently running those tests, in house. Also, it's helpful if if customers have any desired, any any desired specs to follow, whether it's desired amplitude or frequency to to test under, we can certainly try and and work that out, on our end. Great. Good answer. The next question asks, how does p g one fifty a perform in regard to outgassing? So, with PG one fifty a and and, actually, all of our silicone based materials, they all follow we all test them under the NASA spec. It's the ASTM e five nine five, which essentially means that if it's a if if the material material passes, if it's less than 1%, total mass loss and, less than, I believe, point 1% in collective volatile materials. So in this case, the material, PG one fifty a, I believe it's far less than a percent. I think it's, like, point 15% total mass loss, and I wanna say it's point zero zero five or something like that in the collective volatile material. So it's it's quite low. So it does pass that spec. Gotcha. Alright. We've got a a pricing question, which feel free to answer it online or, take it offline depending on what you want, James. John asks, what is the price comparison between p g one thirty versus p g one fifty a? I can only really give you kind of a rule of thumb, as far as the pricing. I mean, it it'll feel free to reach us reach out to us, and we can give you more of an adequate, pricing according to, like, cut parts or sheeting. But the kind of the good rule of thumb that I I I tend to tell customers is that for every jump in in connectivity, it's about a two x price difference. Okay. And, I think related to that is this next question. It says, what size sheets are available? Yes. So, the standard sheet size is 200 millimeters by 300 millimeters. Now if a customer has, say, that the for the cut the part aspect of it, say that the yield's kinda bad, we can also make a custom sheet size, to make cut yields better or say that you just needed a larger sheet. I believe the maximum sheet size that we can do is around 600 by 500 millimeters. It's probably gonna limit how how many sheets you can get in, and the the packaging is gonna be kind of, kinda customized. But, yeah, I think it's kind of that's the kind of range that we're working with. Gotcha. Alright. Steven asks, how good is the rebound characteristic? Yes. So, that's a good question. So with the material itself, it's, it being more of a putty, it kinda takes more of a of a a compression set. Some of our gel series, if you're familiar with our with our product line, there's a so called kind of bounce back. And side note, we're actually working on materials that do full, like, 100% bounce back or close to. That's just kind of more in development than anything that has a timeline. Anyways, back to the point at hand is that so the PG one fifty a and most of the putties will just kinda take more of a compression set. That being said, with, say, something like expand like thermal expansion and things like that with your with your assembly, it can, stick to the surface. It'll it kinda, with the compression, you kinda create that vacuum. So it will have some resilience and if, if a gap expands a little bit. Mind you, if it's something really significant, it won't hold, but it it can hold up to a pretty, pretty decent kind of expansion there. Gotcha. Okay. It looks like there's a a follow-up question, or just next up, Stephen Head. Is this the softest product in the product line? I would say it's it's not. So, with the materials itself, it it's it's kinda more it's not the top end. It's not, like, kind of a a general rule of thumb. I think some customers might have is that the the, the more conductivity that's that is in the material or the more conductive the material, the stiffer it is. We've gotten better at that, and, actually, it's kinda it's more kind of mid mid soft here. I don't know what what the shore value would be, but the softest materials that we do have in the putty series would be either PG 45 a, PG 65 a, and, newly released PG 100 a. So it'd kinda be kinda more in the mid range. Okay. We have time for about one question. We'll see how it goes. Question is, can we use heavy liquid metal against compressibility? I'm not sure if I under can we use With with the material itself, I I don't know if you can I think in theory, you could use something like liquid metal with the material? I don't think there's anything that causes any issue there. I think it's more with your with the surface surfaces that you're trying to use that against. So, like, your your cold plate or your hot surface, you obviously I mean, if you're losing liquid metal, you're gonna need to have that sort of, treated. Like, I think it's anodized in order for it to not be corrosive. But as far as the materials, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with it. And, actually, kind of side note, we are working on on a liquid metal, putty compound, which uses some some of our our basic internals for our materials with liquid metal. So I think that's I think that should be perfectly fine. Yeah. I'd, I don't know if liquid metals are compressible. Again, the untrained, not technical. My my guess would be no, but we can, we can follow-up. Looks like, two two people asked this, and, this will be our last question. And I think you answered this earlier, but since other people are asking it, go ahead and answer it again. Do you provide outgassing data? We were talking about the some NASA standards. Right? Yes. Yeah. So we, I mean, essentially, the the catalog has kind of a, like, a little bit of a table that says what the what the numbers are. But if you needed something more in-depth, like the the report that involves, like, the n three testing and what so and so on and so forth for either, the the NASA spec, the ASTM e five nine five or the Bellcore, I think the Soxlet test. I think we also can do that. Those reports are are available from us. You just have to reach out, and we can get you those. Great. And, unfortunately, that we are at time. We've we've got some some more great questions, James, but, I'll make sure that you and your team get these to follow-up with these people individually. But, yeah, everybody, thanks for your questions. And, James, I wanna thank you for presenting today. Obviously, this is an engaging topic and really informative. Not a problem. Cool. And you can learn more at, fujipoly.com. That is gonna conclude Thermolive spring twenty twenty six. On behalf of all our speakers and electronics cooling, thank you for joining us. If you missed any part of today's event, all presentations have been recorded and will be available on demand, usually about twenty four hours after the conclusion of the event. We hope you're leaving inspired and equipped with new insights to tackle your next thermal management challenge. Until next time, take care.